Automotive instrument cluster screen content validation

The automotive industry has exhibited a tremendous development and improvement trend in the last decade. Todays' automobile manufacturers equip their state-of-the-art vehicles with complex LCD Instrument Clusters that provide essential information to the driver. A guideline manual that includes all the features of the car must be provided to the customer. In order to depict all the features of the Instrument Cluster, screenshots of all possible screens of an Instrument Cluster should be grabbed, in all possible languages. This paper describes a novel solution to provide this kind of screenshots to the car manufacturers, called Image Grabber application, using a DSLR digital camera, a CAN case and a C# tool. The proposed solution has no original equipment manufacturer limitations, as it can be used on all types of clusters and provides an implementation cost decrease of up to 10 times, when compared with a similar hardware grabber system.