Automotive

A U.K. based automotive research and development agency required to collect position and dynamics data with 48 channels of analogue data as well as live video at 10 frames/second. All this data had to be collected from a vehicle in real time and transmitted back to a central receiver as well as several outlying laboratory locations.

FSL’s solution was to use NovAtel’s OEM4-G2-RT2 receiver at 20Hz position output with real-time RTK corrections being transmitted over spread spectrum radio.

Onboard the car a full instrumentation system supplied by HBM (Hottinger Baldwin Messtechnik GmbH) read the analogue output from various devices to determine engine temperature, speed, oil pressure, suspension travel, steering angle, vibration, etc… This data, in addition to live web cam broadcast at 10 frames/second, was fed to a central onboard processor and despatched over an Ethernet link to a 16Mbit/second spread spectrum radio. All this equipment was in the car in two compact housings supplied by FSL with a total volume of less than 0.0125 cubic metres.

At the side of the test track FSL established a spread spectrum radio link into a cable based Ethernet network distributing the vehicle data over the customer’s internal network. Baud rate throughput was up to 12Mbits/sec.
FSL’s control software in the laboratory was able to manipulate and operate pieces of the equipment in the car while “on-the-fly”. The software enabled change of logging frequencies and other settings as well as switching equipment when not turned on, through standby to operational. For this project it was deemed important to have minimal time delay for transmission of position data back to the laboratory facilities so a “Virtual RS232 port” was designed into the Ethernet link for low latency transmission.

Unfortunately due to the nature of the project no pictures or data are available.