Hack the Car 🚗

Did you ever want to work an actual research vehicle? Well, here you can!

The setup consists of:

A VW Passat
A Test driver that will drive around for you
Cameras
LiDARs
GPS
Vehicle Data
You, your laptop and your software 😊

Note that there will be no actual closed-loop control of the vehicle. You will only be able to read data from the vehicle, but not control it.

📚 About

Eclipse eCAL™ is a publish subscribe Middleware with the main focus on research and development of autonomous driving algorithms.

A Publisher publishes data to a topic, identified by a name.
A Subscriber subscribes to a topic, identified by a name. When it received data, it calls a callback function.

👾 Hack Ideas

Recognize predestrians
Develop HMIs to fuse point cloud data on an OpenStreeMap
Use the LiDAR to scan a 3D Object
Welcome the owner à la Face ID

💻 Requirements

A laptop:
- Running Windows or Linux. MacOS may work too, but eCAL is poorly tested on that OS.
- An ethernet interface (or a USB to ethernet adapter)
Programming languages
- Recommended: Python or C++
- Other options: C, C#, JavaScript, Rust

👨‍🏫 Hack-Coaches

Kerstin Keller
Florian Reimold
Kristof Hannemann
Rex Schilasky
Florian Geis

🛠 Template Setup

Download and setup Eclipse eCAL:
- 🐧 Ubuntu:
```
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ecal/ecal-latest
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ecal
```
- 🪟 Windows:
  - Download the latest release from https://eclipse-ecal.github.io/ecal/_download_archive/download_archive.html
Connect your Laptop to the vehicle via ethernet cable.

Example measurement: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-wHCBS1mx420NWE4ZJfxF6UJuahHMS0J?usp=sharing

👀 All necessary links

Eclipse eCAL:

🏠 Homepage: http://ecal.io
👨‍💻 GH Repository: https://github.com/eclipse-ecal/ecal
💡 How to compile eCAL: https://eclipse-ecal.github.io/ecal/development/building_ecal_from_source.html