This was the motto of the SDV-Community Day on June 5 and 6, jointly organized by Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation and Mercedes-Benz. In this article, we will take you on two great days with exciting talks and inspiring conversations.

Enthusiasts of software-defined vehicles (SDV), whether programmers or not, met online as well as on site at the Mercedes-Benz Customer Center in Sindelfingen to get in touch and discuss all about SDVs and Open Source.

The two days were filled with insightful presentations of existing SDV projects, enlightening talks by field experts and interactive discussion rounds with people from inside and outside of the community.

When all participants were welcomed with coffee and some opening words, the event started with an Eclipse ThreadX SIG update. After that, Jochen Strenkert continued with an opening speech from the side of Mercedes-Benz Operating System (MB.OS.) where he as the host of the event welcomed all participants and gave a brief overview of what to expect during the next two days: A dynamic and forward-thinking event that is dedicated to Software Defined Vehicles, Open Source Software, Innovation and pushing boundaries.

Following this, Florian Bartels from Elektrobit continued with his talk about a 2-year journey of implementing a cluster instrument in Rust on a platform unsupported by Rust.

Next on the agenda was Florian Gilcher, the Managing Director of Ferrous Systems who spoke about “Creating a Rust SIG within the SDV WG”. His talk was all about the question if and why a special interest group for Rust would be needed in Eclipse SDV.

Right before the first break, Martin Thiede from Accenture gave the participants a first glimpse of a project they are proposing to the Eclipse SDV which is called “Eclipse Open BSW” and revolves around a Software Stack for microcontroller-based ECU´s.

After the break, Thorben Krieger and Daniel Elhs from Valtech Mobility took the opportunity to show the participants the Essentials of an Automotive Cloud. With that, they switched the focus from a more technical to a business point of view and answer the question which problems these automotive clouds should solve for the business.

In his talk about the Eclipse SDV Hardware Reference Platform, Thilo Schmitt from Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation talked about the case for a reference platform, an End-to-End Demonstrator for Eclipse SDV Software and the Eclipse SDV Hardware Reference Platform including a concrete proposal of it.

Even the lunch break had a lot to offer: In addition to lunch, there was a demo car to visit during the 1.5 hours. It showed that you can run an Eclipse SDV code via openDuT directly in the car and it carries signals from the vehicle Ethernet/CAN busses through the Internet and visualizes these signals on a developer Notebook.

Right after the break, Michael Renz from MBTI started off with a project update on openDuT. After having caught up all those who didn´t know much about the openDuT project yet, he was giving updates on the latest developments within the project: The managed mode is now live within openDuT, a client authentication was added recently, the integration into CI/CD pipelines is now possible and the test environment THEO is now available in the “normal” mode as well as the development mode. Furthermore, he talked about EDGAR, a test executor which was intended to launch different containers and the operation support.

This was followed by a further project update by Dr. Thorsten Sickenberger, Mesut-Ömür Özden and Felix Mölders from d-fine who introduced the Ankaios Dashboard and stressed the importance of collaboration within the open-source community.

After having heard updates on existing projects, Chulhee Lee and Punithan Xavier from LGE introduced a new project called “PICCOLO”to the audience, a mixed critical orchestrator for user space.

Continuing with presentations of new projects, Phani Gangula and Julien Loudet from Zetta Scalegave gave an interesting overview on their project “Eclipse Zenoh-Flow”. The project deals with a real-time data flow programming framework that is built on top of Zenoh.

After a further coffee break with enough time for exchange, the talks continued with two Speakers from Microsoft, Ash Beitz and Hans Sperker as well as Christian Hackenbeck from Mercedes-benz, who spoke about digital twins in vehicles including a demo approach with Eclipse Ibeji.

In their talk about Toolchains, Daniel Lueddecke from Harman and Filipe Prezado from Microsoft have investigated the question why tools fail to chain and how to make them chain again. The presentation was less meant to give technical answers but rather act as a call for collaboration.

Last but not least, Thomas Froment from the Eclipse foundation and Johannes Matheis from Vector Informatik GmbH gave an update on Eclipse IDE WG Activities and Paulina Gueorguiva, also from the Eclipse Foundation finished with a presentation on the SDV Marketing Activities including a call for engaging with the content of the Eclipse SDV content.

Ready for Day 2?

After the participants had a night to process the many interesting inputs from the day before, day 2 continued with Open Collaborations. The participants could choose between those two topics: “Software Orchestration Blueprint with Symphony – updates and open discussion” and “Demonstrator of the Cluster Instruments".

After a following coffee break, the participants were spoilt for choice again. Paulina Gueorguieva gave a survey report and roundtable and at the same time, a Rust Roundtable took place.

The event ended with a joint wrap-up and the lunch break at 12:00 pm.

A big thanks to everyone who participated! All talks as well as discussions were extremely enriching and inspiring, also regarding future projects!

Therefore, we can't wait what will be discussed at the next meeting- see you there!