Telematics Detroit is one of the top automotive industry events. The conference attracts leading vehicle manufactures and tier one suppliers and enables them to discuss their visions for telematics technologies that will give consumers a better driving experience and which are more enjoyable, safer, and at lower personal and environmental cost.
As a recognised leader in location and connectivity technology, CSR is always keen to have a presence at such an important event. For the 2012 conference, we prepared a number of innovative solutions to wow our visitors at our booth. Demos of these were filmed at the event by our team and can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
To express our vision of a more enjoyable in-car experience, we prepared a ZiiSound D5 Bluetooth® Speaker and a Motorola RAZR android smartphone to demonstrate the superb audio streaming quality of aptX®. Both commercially available products are equipped with aptX® CODEC technology and deliver CD-quality sound over a Bluetooth connection. The sound coming out of the speaker was well defined and the bass was unmistakable. We were certainly noticed by Telematics visitors! With more and more consumers carrying their favourite music in their phone, those who experienced the sound quality expressed how much they were looking forward to having the technology also available in their car stereo. View the demo
aptX® capability is not limited to just delivering CD-quality audio via Bluetooth. Another market defining feature of aptX® is its low latency. We set up two BlueCore5-Multimedia boards to stream audio from a PC playing a video clip via A2DP over to a headset demonstrating the differences between aptX® and standard CODEC in the “lip-sync” audio visual quality. The difference is readily noticeable by those tried it out and aptX® was very well perceived. View the demo
On the safety side, we prepared a Bluetooth low energy (BTle) multifunction steering wheel. The advantages of using BTle to replace the wired control mechanism are cost and weight reduction. It is estimated that each single wire costs car manufacturer one US dollar to install. For this particular steering wheel, five wires were replaced with CSR1001™ development board which sent commands (e.g. audio volume up/down, answering phone, skip track etc.) to our SiRFprimaII™ SOC platform. This demonstration created a lot of buzz and visitors at our booth were very excited by by this first-of-its-kind demonstration. View the demo
We also demonstrated RealVNC connectivity software running on our SiRFprimaII™ SOC platform. The software projected the full user interface of a smart phone onto SiRFprimaII™. The idea is that consumers will be able to use the projection on SiRFprimaII™ to directly control the phone: to start a navigation application, for example. In effect, consumers can bring their favourite/latest/greatest application into their in-vehicle infotainment system. The true uniqueness about our demonstration is the wireless connection (via Wi-Fi®) instead of the wired connection between the phone and SiRFprimaII™. This was a really impressive demonstration. View the demo
CSR’s introduction of the automotive grade CSRG35ea – SiRFstarVTM Automotive, the first announced product based on the SiRFstarV ™ architecture, was also well received. With this new market leading automotive grade GNSS platform CSR is positioned to address global, as well as regional preferences and requirements such as Glonass for Russia, Galileo for Europe, and Compass for China. Furthermore, the additional satellites accessible by SiRFstarV™ improve position accuracy and availability and will enable CSR customers to develop best-in-class next generation products for the Infotainment and Telematics markets.
CSR had a great show that attracted new interest in our technologies and strengthened our existing customer relationships. I’d like to thank everyone who attended from CSR for helping to wow our audience. And a special thanks to those who made those demonstrations possible.
Regards
Jimmy Pai
Technical Marketing Manager
