National Instruments (NI), the US-based producer of automated test equipment and virtual instrumentation software producer, has showcased a host of innovations at the SIAT 2019 Expo in Pune. At Stall No. 176, the company is displaying testing and monitoring equipment for the automotive industry.
The display includes a telematics validation system which has plenty of technological gadgetry including the emergency call system (ecall system), GPS simulation system and vehicle parameter simulation system. The ecall system has been designed to make a call in the event of an accident or emergency conditions. It syncs with the GPS and the onboard cellular network system.
NI also has an ECU validation kit for internal combustion engines and a validation kit for electric control motors. The company has developed an ECU validation system that can test the compression ratio and the ignition timing variations in an engine. Called ‘Hardware-in-the-loop validation’, the system can simulate all the conditions that an ECU of any type of engine (CV, PV or 2-wheeler) could face. The validation kit for the electric motor has been designed similarly but it operates to monitor a different set of factors that pertain to electric motors (voltage, temperature, current). Factors such as the inverter models and the electric motor models are all simulated around the ECU. The out-of-the-box software on display at SIAT 2019 is developed for carrying out the final test on an EV.
NI has also revealed a system where the camera used in ‘Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS)’ systems can be validated. The system, developed in partnership with Maxeye Technologies, is said to be one of the few in the world that can validate cameras incorporated in ADAS systems. This system would further aid the accuracy of the camera and its entire image processing algorithm.