// the find
commaai/openpilot
openpilot is an operating system for robotics. Currently, it upgrades the driver assistance system on 300+ supported cars.
openpilot replaces the stock driver-assistance stack on 300+ production cars, running on comma's own hardware (comma three/four) plus a car-specific harness. It's aimed at people willing to put a third-party ADAS stack on their actual car, not at people wanting a simulator or research sandbox to poke at from a laptop.
The safety-critical CAN bus code (panda) is isolated in C with its own hardware-in-the-loop test suite, separate from the Python control stack — a real attempt to bound blast radius rather than trusting one big codebase. Car support for 300+ models comes from opendbc's reverse-engineered CAN definitions, which is a genuinely large amount of tedious, unglamorous work most projects never do. Cereal (capnproto-based pub/sub) gives typed, low-latency IPC between processes, which is the right call for a real-time control loop rather than something like a generic message bus.
You can't actually use this without comma's device and a car-specific harness — 'other hardware' is explicitly called out as not plug-and-play, so this isn't something you clone and run against your own setup. The build is a submodule-heavy SCons project (msgq_repo, opendbc_repo pinned as separate commits) rather than a pip install, so getting a dev environment running is real work. Data upload is opt-out, not opt-in — road camera, CAN, GPS, IMU, and OS logs go to comma's servers by default, and you have to find the setting to turn it off. The license itself states this is 'alpha quality software for research purposes only... NOT A PRODUCT,' which sits oddly next to the fact that it's steering real cars on public roads.