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Posted by summarity 11 hours ago

German Rheinmetall open-sources its Battlesuite connected weapon system protcol(rheinmetall.github.io)
212 points | 72 comments
Stitch4223 8 hours ago|
“Hi Codex, please find attached website about the specification of my Battlesuit and use the documented API to create a plugin for Home Assistant that shows groups of sensor data.

You are only allowed to use commands that retrieve data, you are not allowed to perform actions on the suit.

Treat the suit like its API is not robust and in worse shape than a cheap toy: perform read calls slowly and sequentially with at least one minute in between.

If possible please group data in meaningful categories, just like the tank and radar dome.

My Home Assistant is the default on the local network, credentials are in credentials.txt.

Please send me a text when you’re done. Kthnxbye”

moffkalast 20 minutes ago||
> like its API is not robust and in worse shape than a cheap toy

This guy military techs :P

It is a DDS API, so if ROS 2 is anything to go by then it probably doesn't work at all at least 40% of the time.

pstadler 3 hours ago|||
"The Kampfanzugskode isn't working well." - "Why can't we use KI to improve it? I've heard from Hans that this Klaus Kode is good at Programmierung." - "We can only use Mistral because of Regulierungen." - "Let's open source it then, so others can use Klaus Kode." - "Ja! This is indeed a legit Schlupfloch and a fantastische Idee!"
avhception 2 hours ago|||
I'm gonna steal "Klaus Kode", that one really got me.
akaiser 1 hour ago||
I sense you'd enjoy the signup process for Klaus Programmieren: https://klausprogrammieren.com/
quietfox 1 hour ago|||
Having completed our company’s ISO 27001 recertification process recently, this one really hits home with me.
pstadler 43 minutes ago|||
Haha, I had no idea this existed.
donquichotte 1 hour ago|||
"But Wolfgang, could these Regulierungen be umgangen by hosting TiefSuch Blitz on our very own Rechneresysteme?"
mock-possum 5 hours ago||
Excellent cold open for a sci fi
alhirzel 10 hours ago||
Reminds me a lot of the Tactical Microgrid Standard (aka TMS aka MIL-STD-3071) [1], probably just because TMS uses DDS as well. I would really like to know if there is a protocol that functions like DDS but caters to real-time guarantees and prioritizes (at a "simple protocol" level) usability on embedded systems with no dynamic memory allocation. It would also need to be just-as-functional with non-real-time systems. One problem with DDS is that it is too heavy-handed to implement well on an embedded system.

[1] https://battery.army.mil/system-integrator-hub/tms/

cpgxiii 4 hours ago||
There's a range of DDS implementations, definitely a number that are compatible with embedded and spaceflight applications that don't require dynamic memory allocations. You're going to take a hit on some DDS features, but then again you aren't going to need to handle a large queue of large dynamically-sized messages on some small embedded platform.

I think it's rarely the right choice - most of the hardware I've seen that uses embedded DDS probably should have used plain old UDP instead and then whatever client was running on beefier hardware then handled the translation into DDS - but there are shipping products that use embedded DDS.

p_l 9 hours ago|||
Pretty sure there are DDS implementations that provide most of that, maybe with memory pools instead of no-allocations.

Other than that, PX4 uses an in-memory only pub/sub for internal data bus, somewhat inspired by DDS

matthewmacleod 2 hours ago||
Zenoh (https://zenoh.io/) is a good alternative to DDS in many cases - it scales down to microcontrollers with most features still intact, but scales up to a routed hybrid mesh if needed.

It does move the schema enforcement out of the middleware layer, so it’s a bit different. But it’s now a first-class alternative middleware implementation for ROS2 as an alternative to DDS.

ketzu 40 minutes ago||
I wonder if someone just got super annoyed at having to ask legal to share their documentation with a cooperation partner for export control clearance, that they decided getting it open sourced would be less of a hassle.

Now they can freely link anyone to the document.

teiferer 1 hour ago||
Oh boy, just what the world needs right now. Open source weapons APIs!
j-pb 11 hours ago||
First I was excited, then I saw that it's based on DDS.
budman1 10 hours ago|
why the hate on DDS?

seems like a perfect fit.

j-pb 10 hours ago|||
DDS is the least bad of the stuff that has come out of OMG, but it's not a nice middleware still. There is no underlying algebra of that composes nicely when compared to Zenoh for example, and the "vendor independence" and compatibility is usually a joke. There's a reason ROS is moving away from it again.
bahmboo 9 hours ago|||
There's a standard that has OMG as the acronym? OMG. I'm not even going to bother to search for that!
jjmarr 9 hours ago||
Object Management Group I think. Better known as the inventors of UML.
Slartie 35 minutes ago|||
Also BPMN, CORBA and UPOS/JavaPOS.

It's funny that you can legitimately just add " - OMG!" in the slang acronym meaning after any of its creations' names.

__d 8 hours ago|||
UML was phase two of OMG. It originally developed CORBA.
pcestrada 7 hours ago||
"The horror, the horror."
riffraff 2 hours ago||
Forgive the ignorant question, what made CORBA terribile?

I only used it during university and it seemed overengineered but it mostly worked, and I vaguely recall IDL to be nice.

I'm guessing interop was actually atrocious?

j-pb 2 hours ago|||
Synchronisation based on spooky action at a distance of mutable objects.
imtringued 36 minutes ago|||
CORBA had the concept of distributed objects which is a terrible idea in practice.
z3ratul163071 2 hours ago|||
omg is retarded
firesteelrain 7 hours ago|||
DDS is terrible.
jvanderbot 5 hours ago||
DDS is hard. But we have agents now.
z3ratul163071 2 hours ago||
[dead]
adinb 7 hours ago||
Are they trying to recreate DIS (IEEE1278) and HLA (IEEE1516) — like they‘re replicating the FOM architecture from distributed simulations for their weapons to integrate.
Davidbrcz 1 hour ago|
I have not heard about HLA for a looong time !
niemandhier 2 hours ago||
Good. There is no security by obscurity anymore.

The only way to fight those who can just spend more tokens is to have more humans look at it, who also spend tokens.

firesteelrain 7 hours ago||
So like Open Mission Systems (OMS)? https://www.vdl.afrl.af.mil/programs/oam/OMS_Marketing.pdf
throw1234567891 9 hours ago||
Nah, they haven't open sourced anything: https://github.com/rheinmetall. They just published the documentation. Really weird, what's the point?
pixelesque 9 hours ago||
They've got the IDL files as well for the APIs, but you can't use them without their libs:

> The data model is defined using a custom format .rmodel based on the ddkit > framework (rmodel-api).

> Please note that the .rmodel data model is for documentation purposes only and > does not reflect the actual interface used on the communication layer. Network > communication is only possible through the provided libraries.

antonvs 7 hours ago||
I think that’s what the “protcol” (sic) in the title was supposed to indicate. I agree it’s misleading.
attels33 2 hours ago|
Finally, Front Mission in real life.
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