Any plans for future updates?

[zllfdd]

Sorry to bother you. I noticed there hasn't been a commit for about 2 years. I just wanted to ask if this project is still being maintained or if it has been deprecated.

[michael-hillmann]

Hi everyone,

first of all: thank you. Seeing that people are actually using the CANopen Stack in real projects is the main reason we still care so much about it.

You’re absolutely right to ask about the future. The honest situation is this: over the last ~2 years development slowed down heavily (and effectively paused) because we had to focus our limited time on revenue generating work to keep the company running. That was not a decision against open source or against this project, it was simply the reality of a small team with finite bandwidth.

Where we stand today

• The project is not abandoned.
• We’re still getting feedback and questions from the community, and we’re grateful for everyone who reported issues, tested, or contributed.
• We want to bring the stack back into active maintenance and development, but to do that reliably, we need dedicated time, and dedicated time needs funding.

Our plan to revive the project

If we can secure sponsorship, our intention is to restart with a pragmatic, community-driven roadmap, for example:

• Stabilization pass: review open issues/PRs, CI housekeeping, release process, documentation fixes
• Maintenance cadence: regular triage and predictable response times
• Feature work: prioritized by real user needs (and sponsor priorities), discussed openly

We don’t want to make vague promises or start and stop again. The goal is sustainable maintenance, not a short burst.

Sponsorship: what we need

To make this happen, we’re looking for one or more sponsors (companies or individuals) who rely on the stack and would benefit from:

• faster issue turnaround
• prioritized fixes/features
• long-term project continuity
• the reassurance that the project is actively maintained

If your organization uses the stack in production (or plans to), and you’d like to support ongoing development, please reach out. We’re happy to discuss sponsorship levels and what kind of maintenance/feature roadmap would make the most sense.

You can contact us directly at hillmann@embedded-office.de.

How you can help (even without sponsorship)

If sponsorship isn’t possible, contributions are still very welcome:

• testing on real hardware
• documentation improvements
• PRs for bug fixes
• confirming issues and providing minimal repro cases

Again: thank you for your patience and for pushing us (in a good way) to be transparent. We want to give this project the attention it deserves—and with the right support, we’re confident we can bring it back to life.

Best regards,
Michael Hillmann
Embedded Office / CANopen Stack Maintainer