The connectivity aspect
Data is acquired from onboard diagnostic board and controller area network bus on the vehicle. Every typical car has these on board, which is a network of points. There are electronic control units within the vehicle, which control doors, vipers, power train and so on. These provide crucial data to the hub, and the processing follows.
Added awareness. The product’s awareness features work on data analytics, driven by two major paradigms. One focuses on real-time analytics for quick decision making and the other works on studying the pattern of usage in order to benchmark against reported events or trend analysis. Once the trend analysis is inferred, predictive analytics can also be enforced.
On another track, companies providing maintenance, insurance, etc could tap into this system and thereby work out strategies to better service the customers based on the way they handle their vehicles.
The system has capabilities to flag certain non-compliant events that could endanger the vehicle such as a faulty door/engine speed-limit infringement, and initiate emergency notifications. Critical minutes of an unfavourable event happening to the vehicle and the passengers are reduced in this process, reducing changes of accidents. The system is programmed to feed in emergency contacts so that help reaches the spot where the vehicle was last reported. This is done by combining software, hardware and Cloud connectivity powered by analytics. Media, connectivity skills and embedded skills, all contribute to designing this system.
The next step
Towards the end of the infotainment project, the teams involved asked themselves a rather simple and regular question: “How can these features be designed better to add more value to end users—how can we further improve the driving experience?”
Amidst all the discussions and research, the teams started toying with the idea of a more sophisticated display that also enhances safety. A return to the sketchboard showed that there were very few after-market head-up display (HUD) products, and most had a cluttered and user-unfriendly UI design.
Leveraging the experience of the infotainment project, Embitel developed a clutter-free and user-friendly hardware and software design of Car HUD. You can see the layout and design in Fig. 1. Although the final design looks simple, the process to come up with such a design involved a lot of work.
This proprietary design is production-ready and is of automotive-grade. This ensures that a customer can launch the Car HUD product in six months.
