What role did Crystal play in Nikola's revival?

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We can’t and do not want to do everything ourselves.
Our core competence is on the controls and the software.
this is where the Nikola is really good at.

Nikola CEO told Commercial Carrier Journal at ACT Expo 2023.

I’m very curious, does both controls and software use Crystal?

Maybe someone(insider) can share some details, anyway, hope Nikola become the next giant, that would be very beneficial for Crystal.

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I ran a Birds of a Feather session about Crystal with Nikola’s CIO at either RailsConf or RubyConf several years ago, can’t remember which. They were still getting going with Crystal on the server side, I think they had 3 Crystal services at the time because their Rails app was too slow for certain operations. But also, IIRC the backend for the entire infotainment system in the trucks runs on Crystal. I don’t remember what the UI uses, but I don’t think it’s Crystal bindings for a UI library like GTK.

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Can you imagine the advantage for them and us if they opensourced that?
Maybe someone could try to get an interview with them about their crystal use, and ask about releasing some libs?

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I’m like 90% sure it’s web based but I haven’t found my source for that yet

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Oh yeah, here we go: Nikola Motor Company: Crystal powered dashboards on the trucks of the future | Manas.Tech

The infotainment, instrument cluster and telematics system (communications between the vehicle and the Cloud) is all written in Crystal with Amber Framework…

We’re essentially following the Electron paradigm, but we use Crystal instead of node.js to generate all the APIs and HTML.

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Revival? Doesn’t look like it…

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That was the downfall. We’re now in the revival stage as Nikola is still surprisingly doing well after all that drama

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I may have spoken too soon :/ Nikola shares tank after EV maker recalls its battery-electric big rigs | TechCrunch

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The stock is back up to within 1.3% of where it was before that drop. They’re still up 250% from where they were at the beginning of June. They’re too volatile for me to invest in heavily right now (I’m trying to buy a house — I need guaranteed returns even if they’re low), but they’ve been in a better spot the past month than they have been since March.

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The ceo however, seems unaware that crystal even exists

“The entire infotainment system is a HTML 5 super computer,” Milton said. “That’s the standard language for computer programmers around the world, so using it let’s us build our own chips. And HTML 5 is very secure. Every component is linked on the data network, all speaking the same language. It’s not a bunch of separate systems that somehow still manage to communicate.”

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You could hear the wincing and groaning from the development department when they read that quote, all the way to Europe…

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I love this techno-bubble, sounds straight out of some Holyweird psuedo-hacker movie. Very Secure, Linked on the Data Network :rofl:

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