Qt and QML Based HMI Widgets and OTX Scripts for Diagnostic Test Equipment 2018-01-1358

Today’s road-vehicles (passenger cars, LDV, MDV and HD commercial vehicles), as well as non-road mobile machinery (NRMM), are equipped with E/E systems that consist of electronic control units, in-vehicle networks, sensors, actors, wiring, connectors, and some electrical and electrohydraulic components. Coping with the increasing complexity of these systems requires a new approach for external test equipment being deployed in the entire process chain: development with verification & validation for SOP, manufacturing/production, and after-sales service.

Numerous papers are dealing with the technology of external test equipment, (remote) diagnostics, troubleshooting, guided fault finding, predictive maintenance and the standardized components, such as UDS, MVCI, ODX, and OTX.

Diagnostic sequences are described in OTX and processed by an OTX runtime module. The OTX runtime module uses the MVCI D-Server API, and the D-Server processes diagnostic data which is described in ODX.

This paper starts with a brief introduction to the standardized components. It focuses on the description of how to create a Qt and QML based HMI for the external test equipment executing the OTX scripts. The main benefit of the Qt is the multi-platform capability and possibility to create custom HMI widgets with a QML script. Once created, tested and approved, the custom HMI widgets along with the respective OTX sequences can be used and re-used for the creation of any kind of customer-specific test equipment. Furthermore, the Qt’s multi-platform capabilities allow the users to create visual rich and very advanced HMIs that have the similar look and feel on all target platforms including Linux and mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS. All examples presented in this technical paper are based on the open-source version of Qt (version 5.9).