On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 6:29 AM, Tom Parker <tom@carrott.org> wrote:
DBC is being used by comma.ai see https://github.com/commaai/opendbc
That's actually one of the reasons I brought up DBC. You can essentially use all of their signals definitions for free if you use DBC or KCD. So, that's a big jump start in device support. It's very advantageous if we all can use as much of each other's work as possible.
I'm not sure why so many open source can bus efforts have been abandoned before they're fully done.
Lots of reasons. One, because nobody is holding their feet to the flames (so to speak). When a developer is being paid at a commercial company there is pressure to produce a "finished" product because you can't really sell vaporware (at least you shouldn't). A lot of open source projects started out as something that somebody needed to do what they wanted to do. Once that project gets to the point that it does what they needed there is no pressure left. It does what they needed. So, they quit. They find some other thing they need and they start on that. This leaves tens of thousands of open source project scattered everywhere that kind of do what the original developer wanted to do before they got bored or got to the point where it wasn't fun or where it did what they needed. I can speak to this directly. I have lots of open source projects on my github account. Some haven't been worked on in years. There was an idea, that idea got worked on, the idea was abandoned, so was the project. The source lingers on. Also, I've experienced a lull in development too. With SavvyCAN I wrote it so that I could do some reverse engineering (following the theme of open source projects that scratch the developer's itch). At a certain point I was nearly the only one using it and so once it worked for me it kind of stagnated a bit. I was the only developer, one of like 3-4 users. It just never seemed too important to make it work for a wide range of people or to document it. It could easily have fallen into the open source hole and been stagnant forever. But, it ended up getting popular recently for a number of reasons and now the pressure is on to keep going. So, really, I think the number one problem is lack of an audience. If no one is using your work it's easy to get discouraged/disinterested and just go on to something else.