Boards return from the assembly house looking great; software development underway
|
Mountain View, CA- February 27, 2008, Aubrey Calder, President and CEO of ACI, announced the official release of the GPS Speedometer to the prototype phase of product development. Aubrey explained this means that the PCB design portion of the project has been completed and now it is time to build it and develop the software and HDL code. "This is a critical product that will play very well into the automotive market in situations where the speedometer of a vehicle isn't very accurate and to fix it would be prohibitively expensive" says President Aubrey. ACI is developing this innovative product in an exclusive contract with an undisclosed customer. Projected volumes of the final product were not available at the time of this press release and the ACI media relations department would not comment. |
Below: One of the protytpes with the displays on. Time is shown on the top LCD, air pressure on the bottom. Dummy data is displayed on the 7 segment displays on the left, and simulated GPS signal strength is displayed on the dot matrix display. |
|
Below: One of the assembled boards with the companion OEM GPS receiver |
|
Packed with features
ACI was selected to design the GPS Speedometer because the organization has key creative and engineering talent in-house which enables it to develop such a unique product. Aubrey explains: "ACI was tasked with finding a solution to a problem and the GPS Speedometer is our elegant answer to that problem. Using Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) components for some parts of the system, and designing our own display board, makes a wonderful display solution that we feel will make our key customers very happy." The basic requirements of the system is that it display the speed and time accurately in a vehicle. The ACI GPS Speedometer has two sets of 7 segment LEDs which can be user configured to display time, speed, temperature, altitude, mach number, or other data, depending on the options purchased for the system. In addition, a large character based LCD can display more information such as latitude and longitude or any other data available to the system. Configuration of the system is accomplished through the LCD and a joystick which allows easy navigation through the menus.
Practically uses the latest technology
The GPS Speedometer features a Red, Green, and Blue (RGB) LED to display status of the system. "This RGB LED is almost the cutting edge of LED technology; From just three primary colors, we can synthesize hundreds of other colors of our choosing for precise status indication. If the Department of Homeland Security can use 5 colors to display the basic threat status of the country, we figured being able to display hundreds of intermediate points of status would be even better" stated President Aubrey. A Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) from Altera is used to perform critical simultaneous display control functions while a Microchip PIC18F8722 microcontroller is the primary processing unit for the board that is so powerful, it can perform millions of instructions per second. An OEM GPS receiver unit acquires and tracks L1 GPS signals and sends them to the GPS Speedometer through a high speed serial link. The GPS Speedometer is field upgradable with an optional upgrade kit so new features can always be added if the end user requires additional capabilities. In the future, ACI may support a Heads Up Display (HUD) option to improve the driving experience. ACI expects to ship the GPS Speedometer in early 1Q08 for price of about $3,000 each in quantities of 100K. Discounts may be available for qualifying customers.
