Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) Holds Face-to-Face Meetings in Tokyo

An AGL face-to-face meeting was recently held in Tokyo on June 22-24. The focus of the meeting was the creation of an Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) demonstration for Automotive Linux Summit, to be held July 13-14 in Tokyo, Japan. A similar meeting was held last year to create a demo for CES 2016, only more participants attended the meeting last week confirming a heightened interest in AGL. The companies in attendance were Toyota, Mazda, Renesas, Linux Foundation, Panasonic, Fujitsu Ten, ADIT, NXP, Pioneer, NTT DATA MSE, The Qt Company, Hitachi and Microchip Technology Japan. The meeting was hosted by Microchip Technology.

The goal of the meeting was to create a compelling demo of the technology as a group rather than focus on individual corporate frameworks. By including the knowledge of the 20 developers from the individual companies, we were able to begin constructing a reference platform consisting of software and hardware beyond merely providing specifications and documentation. A working concept was one of the results of the meeting and shows that AGL will be successful in the automotive market.

The idea is to take this working model (below) created in the face-to-face meetings and convert it into a professional looking display that can be shown at the Automotive Linux Summit in July.

The concept demo in the image above shows a Renesas R-Car M2 porter board simulating the car’s head unit and running the latest AGL Unified Code Base software, nicknamed Brilliant Blowfish. All music and movies are provided from the board to Microchip’s Media Oriented Systems Transport (MOST®) amplifier board along with a MOST interface using NXP’s i.MX6 evaluation board and display. This is simulating a rear-seat infotainment display connected to the head unit. The home screen and menu of the head unit is controlled by a touch screen or by an iDrive-like controller. HVAC units are also controlled from the head unit via CAN and LIN bus interfaces using K2L’s Optolyzer® MOCCA CL solution.

This allows us to simulate the control of the temperature, fans and vents, all running over a real CAN bus using AGL. We look forward to sharing the demo with everyone at Automotive Linux Summit next week, July 13-14 in Tokyo!