Automotive Lighting Solution Development for Heavy Vehicles

About the Customer

Our customer is a Tier-1 automotive supplier with focus on products and solutions for efficient commuting and transportation. They are in pursuit of developing smart and innovative lighting solutions for heavy vehicles.

We had quite an impactful partnership with the customer as we shared a similar vision based on consistent innovation and excellence.

Business Challenge

Federal motor vehicle safety standard mandates that every truck trailer is equipped with multiple lights to indicate various functionalities of the truck. For instance, yellow color is for left turn signals as well as hazard lamps. As these lamps indicate the sound functioning of various systems, they must always be working in perfect condition.

Power supply to all the lamp circuits must be accurately monitored at all times or it may have serious consequences. It becomes highly challenging because the trailers are huge and there are hundreds of lamps to be monitored.

Owing to all these challenges, our customer was looking out for a reliable technology partner that would help them develop a solution to monitor the health of these lamp circuits and make the diagnostic data available on the cloud. They had tried out a similar solution from a vendor but were not completely satisfied by the results as there were discrepancies in the diagnostic reports.

Embitel Solution

Our task was to deliver a turn-key solution that would include complete application (software), hardware design, communication protocol (CAN and J1939), HAL, device drivers and UDS based vehicle diagnostics and Flash Bootloader.

As the customer had reported issues with the existing solution, we had a clear idea of the customer’s pain point. Following multiple discussions, the requirements were finalized, and scope was defined:

• Production-grade Hardware design
• Firmware development for the Light Detection ECU
• UDS based Bootloader

We undertook following activities in hardware design:

• Hardware Schematics design: Included design of protection circuits, power circuits and interface circuits etc. using Cadence tool
• Layout design & Gerber file generation: Layering decisions based on speed usage, track designing and component mounting; Gerber file generation and checking using Cadence tool and CAM350
• BOM preparation and Board bring up: BOM optimization and support for board bring up
• Verification and validation of hardware: Support for EMC/EMI testing as per CISPR standard, transient testing

Software design and development:

We developed application layer of the solution with five components in total. In addition to that, the base software comprising of HAL and diagnostics and low-level drivers (LLD) was developed from scratch. All these components were required for the lighting solution to perform two main tasks:

1. Monitor each circuit current and identify its status
2. Communicate the status over SAE J1939

Here’s a snapshot of the components that helped in achieving these tasks:

• ECU State Manager: Manages different operating modes of the lighting ECU
• Supply voltage monitoring: An interface to get the supply voltage to check whether the supply voltage is within permissible range
• Circuit Manager: There is a circuit manager for each circuit. It checks the status of each circuit and communicates the status over SAE J1939

In addition to the application layer, design and development of low-level drivers and Hardware abstraction layer has also been performed. A UDS based Flash bootloader is implemented for ECU re-programming. ECU communication and vehicle diagnostics have been performed by SAE J1939 and UDS (ISO 14229) stacks respectively.

Embitel Impact

Owing to our comprehensive experience in developing automotive lighting projects, we were able to deliver the project within a short timeframe. We have a library of vehicle diagnostics and ECU communication protocol stacks comprising UDS (ISO 14229), CAN and SAE (J1939) that helped us reduce the turn-around time by at least 6-8 weeks.
 

Tools and Technology

Cadence: Used for hardware schematics, layout, and Gerber file generation

Eclipse IDE: Coding and debugging

Tessy Tool: For Unit Testing