LCDs are effective to display abundant information in a compact space. Therefore, the use of TFT or DOT metric displays in dashboard instrument display is getting popular in recent years. However, it is important issue for car makers how to let users know information about vehicle functions or outside environment and manage plentiful information.
In this paper, the Rapid Control Prototyping (RCP) tool is proposed to design and standardize HMI logic associated with display contents in TFT or dot type LCD applied to an instrument cluster. In addition, it is possible to estimate HMI logic in advance by using this RCP. By this process, we can minimize the design and validation time of the vehicle specific HMI logic and improve the quality. As a result, we can dramatically reduce the total period of developing an instrument cluster.
The HMI simulation tool can minimize the difference between display output of simulation and realistic display outcome of instrumentation, because this tool models HMI logic and displays the result on real LCD hardware applied to an instrument cluster. Thus, the RCP simulation tool has an advantage to more realistically estimate the display outcome operated by HMI logic designed.
This paper demonstrates how engineers can connect the display hardware of an instrument cluster to the HMI logic created with MATLAB simulink® and assess HMI requirement and the display outcome in advance.
