Arm And Linux-based Vehicle Information Display And Control Terminals

Automobile instrument assembly is the significant interface for automobile to exchange information with the driver. In the early time, the instruments equipped on automobile were made up of massive mechanical and analog components, and a few digital components. It had many disadvantages such as low precision and stability, large size with less information and cumbersome control buttons. To solve these problems, large-size LCD touch screen, CAN bus interface and high-speed micro-controller have been applied in this vehicle information display and control terminal.The main job of this paper is to design the model machine of vehicle information display and control terminal: schematic and PCB diagram designing using PROTEL99, hardware debugging, embedded Linux porting and LCD driver designing.This vehicle information display and control terminal is based on embedded technology. The designer chose S3C2410 ARM9 micro-controller as the kernel, expanded MCP2515 CAN bus controller IC produced by Microchip and LQ080V3DG01 8 inch TFT-LCD produced by Sharp. The terminal also expanded NOR FLASH,NAND FLASH and SDRAM as external memory system. In the aspect of interface, CAN bus, USB, RS232 and Ethernet port were extended. And to get analog and switch signal, AD and GPIO pins were laid out.To get a real-time and multi-task software operation environment, embedded Linux system was trimmed and ported to the vehicle information display and control terminal. And LCD driver in Linux system was also a point of software design.The design of vehicle information display and control terminal based on embedded technology is only an attempt for automobile instrument assembly's digitization and virtualization. However, there are still many things to do before application.