Whether in mature automotive markets like North America or Europe or in growth regions like India, drivers want to take advantage of increasingly ubiquitous mobile connectivity. At the NASSCOM India Leadership Summit here, Ford is demonstrating its exciting and new OpenXC research platform and the potential of open-source application development for automobiles.
Ford Motor Company continues to explore new frontiers to further drive its pioneering efforts to deliver affordable industry-leading technology solutions for its next-gen and connected consumers. The inspiration for OpenXC came during one of Prasad's visits home to India where he noticed that even those who couldn’t afford a car were able to afford a smart phone. The observation challenged him to deliver similarly relevant and affordable connectivity in cars.
OpenXC is an open-source hardware and software platform developed by Ford Research and Innovation and New York City-based Bug Labs to unleash the power of local developers to determine niche market-specific applications that take advantage of mobile connectivity.
OpenXC includes an interface module based on the popular Arduino platform that allows developers to read data from the vehicle’s internal communications network. The hardware module provides real-time access to parameters like the vehicle sensors, GPS receiver and vehicle speed that can be read by apps while keeping everything isolated from the vehicle control systems.
Ford has just started shipping the first OpenXC beta toolkits to Universities such as the University of Michigan, MIT and Stanford, as well as initial developer partners, including Weather Underground in the U.S. and HCL Technologies in India.
At NASSCOMM, Prasad will be demonstrating an app created by HCL that runs successfully on a Ford Figo. The application allows a driver to send ‘Late arrival notification’ and ‘Safe arrival notification’ to selected personal contacts with an automatic location update during his travels. By monitoring location and speed information from the vehicle, the app can determine if the driver is running late for a meeting and then send an email or text message notification to other attendees without any input from the driver. The app can also notify the driver’s family following a safe arrival after a road trip.
