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Porting of Android OS on Toradex SoM for a Smart Electric Scooter

 

About the Customer:

A prominent electric vehicle startup, our customer has embarked on the journey of ‘Make in India’. This company of young entrepreneurs is designing Smart Electric Scooters, from the ground up, in India.

Headquartered in Bangalore, the automotive startup is working towards bringing the electric vehicles to the mainstream market and providing a superior commute experience.
 

Business Challenge:

The customer had been working on making connected Smart electric scooters with the help of an in-house team. The critical areas of software and hardware development involved designing of the battery management system, dashboard HMI, battery pack, vehicle suspension and more.

The proposed fully connected, smart electric scooter boasts of advanced features such as on-board navigation, remote vehicle diagnostics and Android Infotainment system. This advanced infotainment platform had been initially built on a Toradex SOM and was running on the Linux 3.14.28.

But owing to the growing popularity of Android as a dominant OS that caters to a wide array of Android Apps, the customer wanted to port Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) onto their Toradex SOM with carrier card.

Here the challenge was that the Toradex module does not inherently support Android Operating System capabilities.

Thus, our customer started looking for a reliable embedded product development specialist who could help them with seamless Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) porting and provide technical support on Toradex platform without affecting the performance of their infotainment system running Linux.
 

Embitel Solution:

Porting of Android
During the brainstorming sessions and technical workshops, customer developed trust and confidence in the embedded software and hardware expertise of our team. Also, our past experience in developing an end-to-end Infotainment and Automotive Head-up Display systems proved to be a value-added advantage for our customer.

Equipped with a technically strong and experienced team, we took up the challenge of migration to the Android 6.0 OS without affecting the performance of the infotainment system running on Linux.

The Embitel team took charge to build an Android based solution that involved:

  • Setting up the Build Environment.
  • Porting of Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) onto Toradex SOM which was running Linux 3.14.
    • Porting Bootloader
    • Porting kernel
    • Porting Android file system
    • Porting the flashing mechanism from NXP to Toradex
    • Porting the Go Application from Linux OT to Android
  • Integrating Android with the following modules
    • Ublox SARA-U270-00S GSM module with data profile
    • Ublox EVA-M8M GPS modules
    • LSM9DS1 IMU module – A, G,M
    • LVDS based display
    • I2C based touch screen
    • TI CC2564 based Bluetooth module connected over HCI UART.
  • User acceptance testing and document testing

 

Embitel Impact:

Our customer was able to make a smooth and effortless transition to Android M, which seemed quite challenging for them in the beginning.
 

Tools and Technology

  • Cross compiler tool chain for ARM
  • Freescale MFG tool
  • Android 6.0 OS
  • Android SDK
  • File Editors such as Vim , gedit