Exciting transformations are underway as we gear up for major releases in March 2024. While we're eager to unveil the innovations coming your way, let's delve into the capabilities of our latest release, offering immediate value and insights.
Overview of changes
The key changes in this release come from Apex.Grace:
New Fault Monitor and Diagnostic Fault Monitor modules
Improvements and extensions to the Process Manager
Extensions and UI changes to the RQt Topic Monitor
Diagnostics and Fault Monitors
The new Fault Monitor and Diagnostic Fault Monitor modules are part of the UDS Diagnostics stack (see here for an introduction). These modules, along with the rest of the UDS stack, are important to system integrators and system testers because they connect Apex.Grace and ROS systems to the ecosystem of tools that are built around the industry standard for unified diagnostics (ISO 14229). The Fault Monitor is an interface to the applications in the system that are reporting failures. The Diagnostic Fault Monitor receives, stores, and translates the failures into a Diagnostic Trouble Code (DTC). This type of fault management is actively used in both the automotive and agriculture industries and can be used in many more because it scales well and is an industry-proven solution.
Process Manager
The Process Manager (made available in the last release) has received several improvements and extensions that allow it to restart process groups, launch self-terminating processes, and launch processes with different user (or group) IDs. These improvements help system integrators create more flexible systems and manage the complexity of starting/stopping large software stacks in the vehicle. We are iterating with the early adopters of the new Process Manager to identify further quality-of-life improvements and will continue to add new capabilities in the next version of Apex.Grace.
RQt Topic Monitor
The extensions and UI changes to the existing ROS Topic Monitor (rqt_topic) plugin make it easier to visualize and introspect large amounts of live data outside of the terminal interface. Adding a tabular view and more frequent sampling of new data helps developers focus on single topics or subsets of all active topics (from the network bus) without having multiple tools open simultaneously. The topic monitor updates message fields when new data arrives — before it was only able to update once per second.
Looking at 2024
The major changes coming next year will remain veiled in mystery for another month. I can share with you that a large number of new features will become available in the engineering releases starting in January and that the fully validated release for those new features is scheduled for the end of March. 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 you are interested in Apex.AI products for your projects, contact us.