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Three Embedded and Iot Topics I Expect to See at Open Community Experience 2024

As the Eclipse Foundation celebrates its 20th anniversary, its annual developer conference is reborn under a new name: Open Community Experience (OCX). With the new name come a new city (Mainz, Germany), and a fresh new concept for the event. One thing that does not change is the focus on the various developer communities that make the broader Eclipse ecosystem. Naturally, Java and Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) will have a prominent place. That’s why they get their own co-located events in Open Community for Java and Open Community for Automotive. But the organisers remembered the embedded and IoT community. We are getting our own track inside the main OCX event!

Here are three Embedded and IoT topics I expect (and hope) will take a lot of place in the track’s program:

1. Sparkplug and the Unified Namespace (UNS)

Since it became an international standard in 2023, Sparkplug continued to advance. Our recent white paper on the business value of Sparkplug shows how this Eclipse open specification can make a tangible difference for organisations looking to extract value from their operational technology data. With Sparkplug version 4 looming on the horizon, I would expect talks about the new features it will bring and the migration path for existing users. Unified Namespace, which is a way to structure data hierarchically according to the enterprise’s organisation, is increasingly associated with Sparkplug and will likely have a presence in the track.

2. Digital Twins

One of the great things about EclipseCon 2023 was the significant participation of members of the broader digital twins ecosystem. In particular, participants from the Industrial Digital Twins Association (IDTA) shared the progress made by the open source projects under the Eclipse Digital Twins top-level project. Those projects implement various aspects of the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) specifications, which define toghether the standardized digital representation of an asset. I hope there will be talks on the topic. Of course, a talk or two involving our own Eclipse Ditto digital twin platform would be nice as well.

3. Eclipse ThreadX

Question: Of all the open source Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOSes) currently available, how many are certified for safety critical applications? The answer is one, and its name is Eclipse ThreadX. ThreadX is a relative newcomer to our open source family, since its contribution to the Foundation by Microsoft in November 2023. Yet, with twelve billion devices deployed, there are tons of embedded developers who know ThreadX in the wild. I think several will join us at OCX as participants or even presenters.


Did I inspire you to participate in OCX or even submit a talk? In that case, know that the call for proposals is open until June 10, 2024. However, if you submit by May 31, your proposal will be eligible for early selection by the program committees. Click here to submit a talk now.

See you in Mainz! OCX will take place from October 22 to October 24 2024.
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