Design of an android based input device for electric vehicles

Mobile devices offer a unique opportunity for integration with daily life functions on a unified platform. In spite of market penetration, mobile devices have not made any revolutionary impact on interfacing with the driving functions of an automobile. The primary challenge for this deficiency is the lack of unifying hardware/software platforms and barriers that exists between popular mobile ecosystems. In order to address these issues, this work proposes a unifying platform that has the potential to combine internet connectivity, reconfigurable and personalized user interface and interaction with the automobile. This futuristic paradigm for automobiles is demonstrated using an Android OS based tablet and interface hardware, where the tablet serves as the input device for primary or secondary vehicle functions and the interface hardware could be added to an existing dashboard controller. The interface hardware is based on a real-time multicore architecture board and can serve as the bridge between the connected world and local ecosystem in an automobile. In this article, we discuss our proposed architecture and explore the limitations of this architecture for application in real-time control.