Infrastructure for BMW display unit

In order to enhance and improve the driving experience in cars in general (and autonomous cars in particular), drivers and car testers must understand and feel not only the condition of the environment, but also the condition of the road.

The more the testing procedure is efficient the more the results are reliable, and time is saved. both advantages are highly desired in the era of new technology, and especially in the emerging field of Artificial Intelligence and autonomous cars.

In this project we aim to developed an Android Application to graphically display the vehicles conditions collected by the vehicles sensors, in real-time and with various configurations and features.

Goals and Features:

Our goals and challenges were to provide the user/tester with the following features:

1. Easy-to-use application.
2. Receive sensors data collected by the vehicle, directly from the vehicle without any middle-man.
3. Cloud storage of test results.
4. User authentication to support secure logging and data recording.
5. Support multiple graphs (Up to 3 graphs at a time).
6. Offers different configurations (Resolution, Max value, Color…).
7. Time axis scaling.
8. Previous configurations feature: allowing testers to choose one of previously chosen sensors and configurations.
9. Different appearance theme.

Development process:

In order to ease the the development process, we split the process into 2 phases:

• Phase 1- Emulation phase: In this phase, we develop a transmitter as similar as possible to the operation of the vehicle and the data transfer, including USB serial connection to the Android device, sending the exact same streams format and in high rates.
• Phase 2- Assuming phase 1 works properly, connecting the vehicles USB cable to the Android device should work perfectly, without further modifications, as we emulated the operation of the vehicle exactly.