AUTOMATED TEST SYSTEMS

OBD TESTING

Novator Solutions can help innovative companies secure their
product quality and disrupt the market through advanced OBD
testing.

AUTOMATED TEST SYSTEMS

OBD TESTING

Novator Solutions can help innovative companies secure their product quality and disrupt the market through advanced OBD testing.

The situation has similarities to the emergence of smart phone apps. Through clever usage of a subset of rather standardized sensors, vast business opportunities can open up. Car vendors have the head start in this, and are capitalizing on it, but the market is changing. Commercially available OBD units reduce the start-up costs associated with industrilaization of physical units. As a result, the field is open for smaller companies with novel ideas. Not owning the design of the units, puts these companies at the mercy of the supplier of the OBD unit though.

Avoiding the supplier trap through OBD emulation

A test system that can emulate a car, and create the physical stimuli that their app and service is monitoring, treating the OBD unit as a black-box, loosens this dependency. This method allows the use of different models and vendors. The units behavior, characteristics, functionality and communication with the apps can be continuously benchmarked and verified. Novator Solutions can offer turn-key systems for this kind of testing. If the only OBD functionality leveraged to offer a service is fault code detection (DTCs), the simple OBD emulators will do the job. However, these services have existed for many years, and as a result, the market is saturated.

Vehicle Environment Emulation

Modern OBD II units has multiple sensors built in. Examples are GPS receiver, accelerometers and gyroscopes. They also come equipped with 3G and 4G capability. This makes it possible to upload both vehicle data from the OBD port, and gathered data from the built in sensors in real-time, and create services around it. Stimulating these sensors is well beyond the scope of existing OBD emulators though. It requires various ways of physically emulating the vehicle environment. This requires OBD messages, but also create other stimuli that the unit would experience in a car, and evaluate the response this would create in the software service that is the company’s offering. These are physical, electromechanical systems though. Building them based on the existing emulators requires knowledge that typically does not reside within a software centric company.

OBD Testing Platform

It is difficult to find test tools that can do precisely what you want when working in an emerging market where new and innovative ways of using an openly available platform are discovered. Actually, if they exist, it indicates that there is already plenty of competition in that field. The closest you can get is a platform that can be quickly repurposed and packaged as a turn-key system for verification of a new, innovative service. In the context of OBD testing, such a platform should be capable of generating OBD messages and different physical stimuli that maps to sensors built in to commercial OBD units. Novator Solutions has such a platform. We also have extensive general knowledge about developing physical emulators and integrating them into test work flows. If you are, or are considering, developing a service based on OBD unit data, do not hesitate to reach out.

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