Track: Embedded

Theme: CODE

On: Oct 31, 2014, from 13:30 to 15:35

Track leader(s): Gaël Blondelle (Directeur France, Eclipse)

For few years, Open Source has gained traction and visibility in the industry, including in engineering teams in automotive, aerospace, railway, … This session presents sucess stories of Open Source projects and communities in such Embedded Systems domain.

Talks

13:30 - How to land on Mars with Polarsys technologies?

Duration: 35 minutes

Speakers: Christophe Boudjennah (Presales, Obeo)

Embedded Software Development tooling has now reached a strategic turning point, as projects become more and more complex.

Historically, tools were developed “in-house”, requiring specific skills and important investments in development and maintenance. As it was clearly out of industries core business, they progressively went to commercial solutions.

The downsize is the vendor lock-in risk, with expensive tools complex to adapt. But, the most critical point for industries in domains such as Avionics, Telecoms or Energy is that commercial tools do not guarantee Long Term availability for several decades.

This is why large industry players and tools providers decided to collaborate on the creation and support of Open Source tools for the development of embedded systems. To support this initiative, they created PolarSys, an Eclipse Industry Working Group organizing sustainable commercial services and ecosystems around open source components.

In this talk we will present Polarsys and explain how its technologies dramatically change the way architects can work on complex systems.

By using the PolarSys and Eclipse Modeling stacks, industry solutions can be created which fully fit the needs of architects (design, analysis, verification, simulation, etc.) in many industrial domains.

This talk will be illustrated by many concrete case-studies.

14:15 - Building Embedded Systems with Builroot and Yocto

Duration: 35 minutes

Speakers: Pierre Ficheux (CTO, OpenWide)

Most of Linux systems are based on a "distribution" which provides components as binary packages mainly targeted to x86 - and sometimes - ARM architecture.

Embedded systems need another way as you should optimize footprint and provide accurate information about package size, licencing or dependencies. A "build system" provides rules (aka "recipes") for building a specialized, portable, secured and optimized distribution.

We'll introduce and compare the main open source build tools such as Buildroot and Yocto. Additionnaly we'll introduce the "non generic" Android/AOSP build system. Finally we'll provide a demonstration of each tool.

15:00 - Babylonware: Open source hardware for embedded critical systems and smart objects

Duration: 20 minutes

Speakers: Elvire Prochilo (Consultante Marketing, Pragma consult)

Closer relationships have been established between Industry and Open Source Software; What about Open Source Hardware ? With the advent of DIY, collaborative initiatives are multiplying : hackerspaces, Arduino and Raspberry PI communities. Each can now hack its connected object by using these open components, but the current baseline is too poor to be used efficiently in the industry. For their part, Researchers deploy forges to present and disseminate the results of their research work. However, even if the access to these components is cheap and easy, industrialists are reluctant to use them in their products.So far, most of the industrialists prefer to develop and maintain proprietary components, which are not in their core competencies, which can be an important post item without having specific added value, but that are essential for their business. Some initiatives are trying to federate organizations in the development of new dedicated building blocks and standards, but without any transversal consideration and federating values.The advantages of open source models (durability, maintainability, reliability of technological building blocks) seem to be a good answer to industrialists needs. So, how to raise barriers that persist? How to demonstrate the commercial benefits of an open source hardware collaborative process? A complete sustainable and profitable contribution model is proposed to professionals by Babylonware initiative. Open source assets and new services with high added value are created and integrated in their offers allowing them to develop their business.Come and participate to the new era of open source hardware for industry and meet the challenge with us ! Our next action schedule will be presented during the talk.