About the Customer:
Our customer, a US based Electric Car Startup, partnered with us to develop a dual display infotainment solution for their high-end Electric Cars.
Our engagement with customer involves development of a Proof-of-Concept (POC) and also a Production Grade Infotainment solution.
Business Challenges:
The customer’s requirement was to develop a quick POC to be tested in their design vehicle.
The initial challenge, faced by our customer, was to choose the best suited hardware that could offer the desired speed and connectivity options to handle multiple displays.
Our customer’s design team was also confronted by the following challenges:
- Designing a custom UI that would be ideal for a 15’’ screen.
- A car Head-up Display that delivers the critical information (fetched from the CAN network) to the driver.
- Keeping the security of the car network and automotive ECUs intact.
- Challenging time-line of less than 3 months for the prototype development.
Embitel’s Solution:
The development of infotainment solution started with the selection of the hardware platform. After a series of discussions and analysis, Freescale/NXP IMX.6 was found to be the best suited hardware platform for this infotainment project.
Our team of Android-based infotainment developers started to build the prototype system based on which the production grade solution would be designed. It took our team less than 3 months to build a prototype of infotainment system for the customer.
We had a ready-to-deploy car head-up display solutions that we customized to the requirements of the customer.
Source: Texas Instrument.
Such agile software and hardware development was possible due to:
- Our extensive experience in infotainment system development.
- Availability of re-usable software and hardware components.
- Readily available HUD functional prototype designed and developed by Embitel.
Project Deliverables:
- Android based central infotainment system with a 15’’ display.
- Head-up display for minimizing driver distraction.
- Integration of the third party Navigation engine to the central display unit.
- Customized UI on top of Android OS.
- Custom Applications for Infotainment.
Infotainment Solution was developed with Following Features
- Audio App supporting– CDDA/MP3, USB Music Playback.
- Android smartphone and iPhone connectivity through Bluetooth- call and contact synchronization.
- Connectivity options such as GSM, GPS-Navigation Internet, USB, Wi-Fi Tethering option, etc.
- Bluetooth Profiles (A2DP, AVRCP, PBAP, MAP, HFP).
- HVAC/Climate controls.
- Vital Vehicle Parameters over CAN.
- Powered by Android 7.1.
- Integrated third party Navigation Engine.
Features of our Car Head-Up Display (HUD):
- Battery and charge percentage.
- Vehicle information- RPM, vehicle speed, vehicle range etc.
- Rear-view camera integration.
- Gear indicator.
- Navigation(Route, Turn by Turn).
- Voice control.
- Gesture control.
Tools and Techniques:
- Cross compiler tool chain for ARM.
- Freescale MFG tool for flashing.
- Android 7.1 Nougat OS.
- Android SDK.
- Eclipse IDE for application development.
- Redmine tool for project management.
- Bitbucket for version control.
