Eclipse SDV Community Day – Where open source meets Software Defined Vehicle

The SDV Community Day of the Eclipse Foundation is an event focused on defining and building the future of automotive, mobility and open source software. Bosch is a strategic member of the Eclipse foundation and as a software architect for the Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) at Bosch Engineering GmbH I had the pleasure to attend this event in June 2024.

The event and the community are dedicated to open source initiatives within Software Defined Vehicles. The automotive industry is facing the challenge of being robust and adaptive to the changing market conditions. The shift from hardware-driven development to software-defined vehicles requires tremendous efforts across all vehicle and lifecycle aspects. To meet various objectives, such as value creation and fostering an innovation culture, the industry is increasingly embracing the use of open source components and collaborative project efforts.

Jochen Strenkert, MB.OS Chief Engineer of Mercedes Benz, kicked off the event with an inspiring welcome speech, highlighting the event host's commitment to embrace open source software and therefore balancing compliance and creativity.

During the event, the community shared relevant project examples and visions for the SDV community. Several projects, e.g., “implementing a cluster instrument in Rust on a platform", (see full SDV Community Day agenda) were related to the programming language Rust, which is gaining importance as a numerous projects are being implemented in Rust. Consequently, a so called “Special Interest Group” dedicated to Rust was established. Interest groups offer a cost-effective way for Eclipse Foundation members to collaborate on a shared interests, fostering collaboration among participating organizations to drive innovation.

The primary focus was on software, with one particularly intriguing project being Eclipse OpenBSW (BSW = Basic SoftWare, Apache 2.0 license). OpenBSW provides an embedded C++ Basic Software Stack for microcontrollers, designed to develop flexible and modern automotive applications in an extensible manner. It sparked my interest because till now, only commercial solutions are available, and this will be a game changer in terms of focusing on real differentiating software parts and relying on publicly available standards. I am eager to learn more about the initial contribution scheduled for end of the third quarter.

Beside the BSW, a SDV Full Stack is in the works, and in collaboration with Eclipse ThreadX (formerly Azure RTOS, MIT license), an open source safety-certified Real-Time Operating System (RTOS), is being introduced to the automotive industry. Furthermore, Mercedes Benz presented its own developed “Reference Hardware”, which uses available compute modules on a base layer. The base layer will also be open source, allowing for independent hardware construction.

The Software Defined Vehicle world is moving fast, and open source software is an essential part of it now. The integration of software components into the automotive industry, such as the OpenBSW project, has been a surprising development for me. I am eager to see what the next building block will be and am thrilled to be a part of this exciting evolution!