Tester targets seamless infotainment system experience

Göpel Electronic developed a test equipment generation that can examine complex infotainment and human-machine interface (HMI) systems in vehicles. The new system enables tests of the engine control unit (ECU) intercommunication, haptics and mechanics, as well as image processing in a single unit.

Designed for use in a broad range of applications from prototyping to end-of-line tests, the infotainment test system accompanies the entire product design and production process.

With vehicles being increasingly connected wirelessly to mobile networks and the internet, performance and complexity of infotainment and handling systems is dramatically growing. To ensure thorough and comprehensive automated tests of human-machine interaction, electric resources, robot interaction and image processing have to be entangled intensively.

In addition, to access the ECU communication requires a large number of interfaces such as CAN/CAN FD, LIN, MOST, Ethernet and LVDS/APIX as well as image generators/grabbers, and conventional image sources. Göpel's new test system covers simulation and test of the above mentioned interfaces and protocols with a modular system.

Another building block of this system is mechanical operation of infotainment systems. This enables test engineers to prove the electrical functions of mechanical control elements along with their haptic behaviour such as force-deflection characteristics. The automated optical inspection of screens and displays rounds off the functionality of this test system. The focus in this segment is the symbol detection and colour identification, as well as reading and processing textual information even in exotic languages.

- Christoph Hammerschmidt
  EE Times Europe