About the Customer:
Our customer is one of the global leaders in fleet management solutions. Their fleet management software and hardware solutions have been deployed in more than 1,00,000 connected vehicles.
With customer based spread across more than 20 countries, this Europe based Tier-I supplier has been delivering fleet management products for the transport industry.
Business Challenges:
One of the successful commercial telematics products of our customer has been designed on Windows CE operating system.
But since Windows is a proprietary OS, there was always an additional cost involved in support and maintenance of the software.
Hence our customer decided to make a switch to a more robust and open source platform such as Linux, which is available for zero license cost, is more flexible, compatible, and came with multiple technical support options available in the market for free.
Customer was also looking for a trusted and experienced embedded product development company who could make the transition seamless without affecting the performance of the Telematics application.
The Embitel Solution:
After the first technical workshop, the customer developed trust in our embedded product development expertise.
Since our Linux team had previously worked with other customers for Android/Linux porting projects, we were well-equipped for this new challenge.
In this telematics project, our team was tasked to ensure that the ported Linux OS should be of production grade quality ; within the challenging timeline set by the customer.
Linux porting on Telematics Unit:
- Establish and Customize YOCTO Build System for different versions of hardware platform.
- Customizing u-boot, kernel and rootfs.
- Provide SDK for further development at customer end.
- Integration Of:
- Vendor Provided device drivers.
- 3rd party drivers.
- Open Source Drivers.
- Customizing standard Linux drivers.
- Implementing power management as per customer requirement.
- Develop Hardware Abstraction Layer for modules GPS, GSM etc.
- Develop Validation Test Framework for required modules like GPS, GSM Power Management, CAN etc.
- Design and develop Firmware Over-The-Air.
- Testing and Integration.
Embitel Impact:
Our customer was able to successfully switch from a licensed platform (Windows CE) to an open source and a more cost effective platform.
Tools and Technology:
- Cross compiler tool chain for ARM.
- Pin Mux Configuration Tools.
- Processor from Texas Instruments (TI).
- TI’s SDK.
