Abstract
The traditional mechanical instrument lacks the ability to satisfy the market with characters of favorable compatibility, easy upgrading, and fashion. Thus the design of a TFT-LCD (thin film transistor-liquid crystal display) based automobile instrument is carried out. With a 7-inch TFT-LCD and the 32-bit microcontroller MB91F599, the instrument could process various information generated by other electronic control units (ECUs) of a vehicle and display valuable driving parameters on the 7-inch TFT-LCD. The function of aided parking is also provided by the instrument. Basic principles to be obeyed in circuits designing under on-board environment are first pointed out. Then the paper analyzes the signals processed in the automobile instrument and gives an introduction to the sampling circuits and interfaces related to these signals. Following this is the functional categorizing of the circuit modules, such as video buffer circuit, CAN bus interface circuit, and TFT-LCD drive circuit. Additionally, the external EEPROM stores information of the vehicle for history data query, and the external FLASH enables the display of high quality figures. On the whole, the accomplished automobile instrument meets the requirements of automobile instrument markets with its characters of low cost, favorable compatibility, friendly interfaces, and easy upgrading.
Highlights
As an essential human-machine interface, the automobile instrument provides the drivers with important information of the vehicle
Since most of the driving parameters are displayed on the TFT-LCD, and the graphical user interface can be designed with great flexibility by programming, only the software needs to be revised to meet different requirements of what kind of driving parameters to display and so forth
In order to guarantee the performance of the automobile instrument under specific on-board environment and to save the cost of the design, several basic principles must be considered
Summary
As an essential human-machine interface, the automobile instrument provides the drivers with important information of the vehicle. Since most of the driving parameters are displayed on the TFT-LCD, and the graphical user interface can be designed with great flexibility by programming, only the software needs to be revised to meet different requirements of what kind of driving parameters to display and so forth. These characters, together with the reserved interfaces, enhance the instrument’s compatibility in different applications. There are some advanced automobile instruments which adopt high performance MCUs (such as i.MX 53, MPC5121e, and MPC5123) and run Linux on them They even use larger TFT-LCDs (such as the 12.3-inch TFT-LCD with a resolution of 1280 × 480 pixels) to display driving parameters.
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