For our first releases of the year, we have focused on stabilization and quality. We are rapidly fulfilling the requirements of our automotive, agriculture, and marine customers. All major developments for 2024 are underway or they have already reached their stabilization phase.
The most prominent changes for these releases are summarized below. While the prospects of stabilization and quality are not inherently attractive, it is a pivotal milestone with respect to deploying production-capable software.
The true beneficiaries of our hard work are the software engineers who use Apex.Ida and Apex.Grace to develop their complex applications and systems. Reach out to us today to get your hands on a copy!
System State Management in Apex.Grace
This Apex.Grace release introduces one major concept: System State Management. This concept is tied to a broader effort to expand the addressable safety cases with Apex.OS Cert. With this concept of System State Management, system architects and developers can design more comprehensive solutions for complete systems than was possible with Apex.Grace v2.0.
This is possible because the new concept allows for programmatically handling complex state changes in dynamic operating environments, such as enabling highway driving functions or parking functions when the vehicle has reached the applicable environment. This dynamic behavior of safely starting and stopping both safety-critical and unsafe applications is deceptively difficult, but we were able to identify a solution that allows developers to design and implement logic to handle these state changes in project-specific ways (meaning we’re not forcing one solution for every use case).
That is achieved through the Event Dispatcher and some tools that will be introduced in a future release this year. The Event Dispatcher introduces the concept of application-specific events. Events are used to represent positive and negative happenings within an application (or even more granularly for the Apex.Grace node(s) within an application).
CAN Connector in Apex.Ida
The CAN Connector provides the interface to facilitate CAN bus communication. This function already existed, but it became clear that this was just a rudimentary solution. Therefore, we moved full responsibility to Apex.Ida where all other communication interfaces are handled. This also allowed us to add additional functionality and, in general, provide a more robust CAN Connector.
The CAN communication interface also supports the transfer of CAN PDUs (Protocol Data Unit) over Ethernet or shared memory. It is meant to be used to interface with MCUs or legacy ECUs (like in systems that are undergoing E/E architecture updates) on a physical bus. The connector is also used to interface with a safety core or communicate with a sensor or other hardware device.
Apex.Ida includes a CAN DBC file importer to automate and ease the work required to incorporate a new sensor or hardware device with the CAN Connector. New CAN interfaces can be added to an existing project in a matter of a few hours.
Looking forward
There are a few more features coming this year, but as mentioned, we’re rapidly settling into the stabilization phase. For those looking to lock in their technologies for SOP, there has never been a better time to adopt Apex.Ida and Apex.Grace! If that line looks familiar, it’s because I misspoke in my last blog. NOW is the best time!
If you are interested in Apex.AI products for your projects, contact us.