The MARUSSIA car has a number of parts from the world leaders of automobile industry, except for its unique design. The design of interior and exterior parts intended to be revolutionary and that is why EMM was not able to utilize driver's dashboard from any of famous cars. MARUSSIA needed some custom design and Mentor Electronics was ready to give it because our engineers gained comprehensive experiences in previous Automotive and Industrial projects.

The initial task from EMM was to design a brand new dashboard for driver with a number of modern features available in luxury cars. The idea of the car is to have a flexible design which can be changed in accordance to a customer’s wishes. For the dashboard it was expected to have a LCD display with easy to change skins instead of usual arrow gauges. It required developing of a sophisticated GUI design keeping the usual functionality of driver’s dashboard.

We split this task into two subtasks: electrical part and GUI. The electrical part of the project was a big effort for Mentor Electronics' engineers because of the lack of official documentation about engine’s electronics from the engine manufacturer. Our engineers literally had to analyze parameters of electrical signals in wires over the engine with an oscilloscope. After the investigation of all necessary signals we decided to have a separate microcontroller which could monitor car states and gather the information from an engines's bus, and an ARM9-based GUI subsystem. Both modules of the dashboard are connected with an UART net over which the MCU and ARM9 interact with a custom protocol.

To satisfy the requirements of the sophisticated GUI it was decided to use the product we supply to Russian OEM companies - system on module SBC-9263. The module is based on Atmel at91sam9263 running at 200 MHz and has 64M SDRAM and 64M Spansion NOR flash. The Atmel MPU has very flexible embedded LCD controller to which a lot of STN or TFT displays can be connected. All these ensures enough power to respond to fast switching signals in a car and show them on a screen. The display used in MARUSSIA's dashboard is 16bit color TFT-LCD with resolution 800x600px and -30..+85°C.

The SBC-9263 module works under Linux kernel 2.6.27 and busybox file system. In spite of very good descriptions how to compile Linux kernel and file system at linux4sam.org, we created more automated and simpler way for it. We offer a script package which can compile a Linux kernel for SBC-9263 based platforms and all LCD-kits we offer. Also this script creates light weight busybox file system with console interface. The script is available in the Downloads section.

The GUI software is implemented with a cross-platform application development framework Qt 4.5.1 for embedded Linux.

The picture of an intermediate version of the dashboard based on ME-MS1000B platform together with a custom extension board to acquire analog signals. This design was used to evaluate a solution.		The final version of the dashboard represented in MARUSSIA B2 at Frankfurt Motor Show 2009.