Case Study for Land Rover

The Client

Land rover is a manufacturer of luxury off-road and Sport Utility vehicles. Working in conjunction with another company called Cognitive Applications who specialise in software applications.

The revolutionary idea from CogApp came from a requirement by Land Rover, who was looking for a way to promote the new vehicle features to the press, as they test drive the new vehicles at launch events.

The solution put forward was to create an unattended commentary system that could promote the new vehicle's features to the occupants while they drive.

Cognitive Applications were bought in to develop the system and came up with a solution that uses GPS coordinates to trigger the system to play audio tracks, at certain positions on a planned route.

The Requirements

The criteria was very specific and had to include; 5 minute battery backup for system to run while the vehicle was starting. All connections had to be locking, including the GPS receiver which as standard uses a USB interface and the commentary software had to be updatable, in the field, by users with no specialist knowledge of the product.

The requirements were very specific and with no 'off the shelf' solution we had to design a system to conform this criteria:

• Solid State PC, no moving parts because it would be used in a vehicle
• Power efficient Fanless Processor
• GPS receiver with locking connector
• CF Card to update software in the field
• Battery backup so the system could run for up to 5 mins when the vehicle first started
• Wide input DC Power Supply
• Windows XP Embedded operating system

The Solution

We designed a bespoke enclosure and specified a mini-ITX VIA fanless industrial motherboard. A 6-24VDC wide input power supply was used that was linked through a 1.3A 12V battery. This gave the PC enough battery backup to run for 5 mins if the power source unstable.

All of the power input and USB connections where changed for locking versions although the USB GPS receivers had to be re-wired to a RJ45 connection in order to keep the interference to a minimum.