Smart OBD Charging Station

Project Summary:

This device was developed for anAutomotive solutions company. Qmax has design and developed an OBD 2 device with LoRa and BLE device for the same customer. You can find the project in our portfolio. That device is portable and has a LiPo battery. It also required firmware update from time to time. Qmax proposed the development of this Smart OBD charging station for charging the OBD device while firmware upgrade is done simultaneously.

The major challenge was designing an interface to access the microcontroller inside the OBD device. Qmax designed special OBD connectors and mating plugs to fulfill this requirement.

The system runs on a 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 processor running a custom Linux application. The smart charging station can house upto 15 OBD devices at a time. The power to charge the Batteries is delivered by a specially designed power supply. The Linux system monitors and controls the power to each of the 15 OBD devices. .

The device is connected to the Cloud engine through Wi-fi or Ethernet. It can connect to a local Smart phone using BLE for configuration or local status updates. The device checks for latest firmware update available on the cloud and compares it with each of the plugged in OBD device. It upgrades the firmware automatically in the ones that has older firmware.

The system has built in fail-safe mechanism to prevent device memory corruption or device failure in case the OBD device is plugged out in the middle of a firmware upgrade or charging session.

Qmax did the complete mechanical design of this product. We have designed a custom enclosure and mounting mechanism. The PCB is long and must be adequately supported to prevent damage during usage. Apart from the initial prototypes, we have supported the customer for the trial production run.

Important Parts:

• ARM Cortex A53 processor
• Semtech I/O Expander
• Silicon Labs USB to UART converter
• Texas Instruments 7 Port Full Speed USB Hub
• Texas Instruments Step down DC-DC Converter
• Richtek Step down DC-DC Converter

Salient Features:

• Rugged Industrial Product.
• Anodized Aluminium enclosure
• Spring loaded contacts for Firmware upgrade
• Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB

Qmax Scope of work:

• Schematics Entry
• PCB Layout Design
• PCB Fabrication and Assembly
• Firmware development
• Board Bring-up and testing
• Enclosure Design.
• Low volume production