Vehicle Cluster Development using MATLAB AppDesigner
The evolution of automotive technology is taking place rapidly and so is the digitization of the existing technology to create new or to modify the existing technologies to increase the customer experiences and to meet the business and market requirements. In this article, we are going to tell you how to create a graphical user interface for making a vehicle dashboard using MATLAB AppDesigner. So, before we begin, what is an electronic instrument cluster? It is a digital dashboard or digital instrument panel for automobiles which displays the car diagnostics, which includes speedometer, tachometer, fuel indicator and so on. It is one of the few modules that communicates directly with the driver.
The picture below is the Vehicle Dashboard we created using the MATLAB AppDesigner.
For designing a graphical user interface, we used MATLAB AppDesigner which is an interactive environment that integrates the two primary tasks of app building: The design view and the code view. In the design view, you can create a layout for the app. By using the drag and drop method, the visual components like gauges, knobs, buttons etc. can be placed on the window accordingly. For designing a vehicle dashboard, we chose two circular gauges for speedometer and tachometer, two lamps for brake indicator and check engine light, one linear gauge for fuel indicator, a numeric digital display for indicating the gear and four buttons for four scenarios consisting different brake and throttle inputs. The colors for the dashboard and indicators have been chosen taking into consideration the aesthetics as well as the driver’s convenience.
Before we talk about the code view, we would like to throw some light on the dataset that we used. For all the gauges and indicators to work for the simulation, you need to fetch some values. For doing the same, we collected a dataset for four scenarios 1)Gradual acceleration, 2)Hard braking, 3)Coasting and 4) Passing Maneuver. The dataset consists of speedometer values, tachometer values etc. for all the four scenarios in an excel sheet.
In the code view, for added control over design and development, you can use MATLAB functions to define the layout and behavior of your app. An object-oriented code is written for the components that are used to fetch values. We have used a callback function for object-oriented programming which is specific to the MATLAB AppDesigner code. Using the same, for all the indicators a MATLAB code is written to fetch values from the Excel sheet and to display it accordingly.
When the button for any one of the scenario is pressed, the indicators displays values and hence, the simulation works. This can be further extrapolated to display real-time information on a LCD touch screen from an automobile by using microcontrollers and an OBD-II adapter.
Refer to the link below for some insights related to the same.
https://www.hackster.io/tinkernut/raspberry-pi-smart-car-8641ca
The Editors for this article are: Sanskruti Raut, Shravani Naware and Snehal Londhe.
Thank you!
