Ford, OpenXC get developers under the hood

By Alex Handy

March 14, 2012 — (Page 1 of 3)
Your car is packed with microprocessors, between 60 and 80 of them, running all manner of systems to keep you on the road and out of harm’s way. Yet not one of those processors is open for you to tinker with. Ford and Bug Labs are working to change that with OpenXC, an Android-based open-source development platform currently in beta.

While “Back to the Future”-style floating, self-driving cars have another three years to appear in our lives before Marty McFly actually arrives in one, the OpenXC project isn't quite on the road to fulfilling those dreams just yet. OpenXC will be about only one type of application: the data-driven app. This platform will give developers access to the mountains of information that pour out of the CPUs in modern cars, but will not allow them to actually modify or manipulate any aspects of the car itself.

TJ Giuli, research engineer on the Infotronics Research and Advanced Engineering team at Ford, said, “OpenXC is a platform that's grown out of several ideas we've been looking at for research for a while. We did a previous platform with similar ideas: You could write code that ran on your car, and we partnered with Microsoft and the University of Michigan, and teams designed applications and had a competition. We took a lot of the things we learned from that platform and applied them to OpenXC.

“With OpenXC, we want to enable anybody to write for the platform. It's based on Android, but it's easier to use. It's open-source software from the beginning. OpenXC is in private beta right now. When we do release publicly, the entire source base will be open.”

Bug Labs, a small-device startup based in New York, has been consulting with Ford to help it determine the best methods for developer interaction with their vehicles.

Peter Semmelhack, founder and CEO of Bug Labs, said he founded his company for reasons similar to Ford’s when it embarked on this project. “One of the reasons I started the company was this guy at MIT Sloan School of Management, Eric Von Hippel, had written a book called ‘Democratizing Innovation.’ He wrote about how manufacturers would have to change in the next 20 years, and let customers be involved, and customize products to their own needs. I took that to heart and applied it to electronics in 2006.

Related Search Term(s): Bug Labs, Ford, OpenXC

Pages 1 2 3

Share this link: http://sdt.bz/36443

Technorati

Digg

Slashdot

Facebook

Friendfeed

Twitter

del.icio.us

Ford releases OpenXC, an open-source API for automobiles OpenXC allows developers to build devices that speak the language of cars. Now developers have to invent with it

From the Editors: Software development in universities Education about software development should better prepare students for work in the enterprise

Pivotal Labs aims to remake PaaS New company, spun out from EMC and VMware, builds software and data fabric layer on top of cloud infrastructure

Ford releases OpenXC, an open-source API for automobiles
OpenXC allows developers to build devices that speak the language of cars. Now developers have to invent with it Read More...