Industry Insights Blog Series
With the advent of digitalization and electrification in the realm of two-wheelers, speed and a powerful engine are no longer the core expectations of a rider. Similarly to the Automotive segment, new features and capabilities—such as connectivity, navigation, companion apps, and more—have become standard user expectations.
Initially designed for high-end motorcycles, such advanced features are now in demand also on lower-end models, including micro-mobility solutions for urban traffic (e.g., scooters, mopeds, three-wheelers) and even powersports (bikes, e-bikes) and recreational vehicles (jet skis, snowmobiles, etc).
Advanced HMI features for two-wheelers
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Smart dashboard with graphical user interface displaying, among other things, vehicle status, travel information
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Advanced Rider Assistance Systems (ARAS), including mapping and navigation systems, adaptive cruise control, and blind spot monitoring
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Companion app integration for remote diagnostics, ride analytics, anti-theft tracking
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Customizable ride modes to adapt performance and look-and-feel to e.g., urban or long distance rides
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Voice command functionality to control navigation, media, or calls via helmet-integrated voice control systems
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Over-the-air (OTA) software updates to add new "premium" features, improve performance, and fix bugs without visiting a dealer
In today's two-wheelers, the digital display is an integral part of the overall brand experience and should reflect the overall vehicle's character of fluidity, promptness, and elegance. The ability to include stylish splash screen animations, dynamic multilingual menus, and swift real-time interaction with data makes a big difference for the success of a product. In a highly competitive market, such as that of two-wheelers, the ability to include such advanced features and a premium look-and-feel while containing costs and time-to-market makes all the difference between the success or failure of a new product.
In a price-sensitive market, success hinges on delivering advanced features like maps and navigation without sacrificing performance or affordability.
To Know More
There is a certain price point that defines the market for two-wheelers, particularly in cost-sensitive regions like APAC. The budget allocated for a digital dashboard sets a strong constraint on what can realistically be achieved. The budget must cover all essential electronic components: a microcontroller (MCU) or microprocessor (MPU), the main board, memory, a TFT LCD display, the HMI design, and more.
Now, including premium features like navigation or maps typically requires powerful SoCs or MPUs, that alone may exceed the entire budget, even before accounting for the display, memory, or other elements. However, when you work with a lower-cost MCU you're left with much more to allocate toward the display, memory, and housing.
The challenge then becomes to port such advanced features to such resource constrained devices like MCUs.
The goal is to maximize return on investment by enabling manufacturers to deliver innovation and advanced features even on cost-effective solutions, like for instance microcontrollers (MCUs)—while maintaining the responsiveness and safety that are essential for the rider.
How to contain costs on high-end features
In short, it turns out that the final software capabilities, performance, and quality are not dictated solely by the hardware resources or cost. Here, the choice of a software development framework makes a large difference in terms of ready-made solutions, resource optimization, and even safety. Let's break this down into the various components.
Learn why Ducati Chose Qt for MCUs
Cost-Effective Hardware
Microcontrollers represent robust devices for applications requiring snap boot, accurate timing, thermal efficiency, and real-time control but pose constraints on resource utilization—constraints that are, with technological advancements, becoming less and less stringent.
While the price point leaves little room for flexibility, it does drive innovation—manufacturers must carefully select components that maximize the value of every dollar spent.
Optimized for MCUs and low-end MPUs, Qt Quick Ultralite (QUL) graphics engine and its hardware acceleration capabilities offer the low footprint needed to run compelling visuals and advanced functionalities on resource-constrained devices.
To further lower the software footprint and increase performance, OEMs can build on bare metal using an OS agnostic framework like Qt for MCUs. This architecture allows developers to decouple GUI development from low-level hardware drivers and system configuration.
By removing unnecessary software layers and dependencies, the result is a lean, efficient system that uses minimal resources while still delivering a rich, modern user experience.
Highly Optimized Components
In terms of functionality, it is unfeasible for manufacturers to create everything from scratch, both in terms of time and cost. Instead, they should rely on a trusted framework offering a wide range of production-grade components targeted to their specific use case and tooling designed to simplify tasks spanning from UI design to deployment to various targets and testing.
Qt comes with 20 years of production history in various industries, among which the Automotive sector, and its HMI libraries (such as those in Qt Quick) target essential mobility use cases and are built with high performance at their core. Even more so within Qt for MCUs, highly optimized UI elements (gauges, sliders, menus) tailored to low-end devices can be customized to fit the manufacturer's own brand's look and feel. For an additional premium feeling, Qt for MCUs enables the creation of an interactive, dynamic, smartphone-like UX with a rich set of animation tools. And the QML language offers additional creative resources and flexibility to further enhance UIs' performance.
It's important to observe that, being Qt Quick an extension of Qt Quick Ultralite, full reusability of the highly optimized solutions developed for low-end devices is ensured on high-end devices.
In addition to the obvious convenience of not having to reinvent the same solutions twice, there is a benefit in the number of high performance applications developed for MCUs that can be simultaneously run on a single MPU-based device.
Streaming
Another way to deliver advanced functionality to the rider while keeping the two-wheeler HMI lightweight is that of streaming apps from a mobile phone to the cluster display. This is the solution adopted on the Eclipse Reference HMI to port the mobile phone's navigation system to the two-wheeler's cluster.
Check our Two-Wheeler Reference HMI
An alternative solution makes use of Qt Quick Ultralite Location to display offline maps on MCUs. This ensures efficient map rendering and top performance with minimal memory usage by leveraging the GPU and maximizing hardware capabilities.
Streaming enables advanced functionality while keeping the cluster system lightweight. The companion app can serve any content to the cluster display, including navigation, music services, setting favorites, and any other app.
Safety Out-Of-The-Box
One may convincingly argue that safety is not a premium feature for two-wheelers, and while the regulatory landscape is still fragmented in this respect, many of the HMI features discussed so far have an impact on safety as well as on usability. There is, however, another layer of safety and reliability that is well covered within Qt Framework, that of functional safety and adherence to safety standards, like those set within the AUTOSAR standard.
In regard to the latter, Qt Group has been closely collaborating with its customers and AUTOSAR vendors to understand the requirements of GUI applications running in a safe AUTOSAR Classic architecture in order to offer a robust and proven integration of Qt for MCUs to such systems. As a result, a robust reference integration of Qt for MCUs with AUTOSAR Classic applications is available to provide a significant reduction in software integration effort. Tools for simulation and quality control are also part of Qt for MCUs' support of AUTOSAR Classic, further streamlining the entire development process.
As for functional safety, Qt Safe Renderer is certified to meet stringent automotive requirements. It renders safety-critical UI elements (speed indicators, warning lights, turn signals, battery temperature in EVs, etc.) independently from the main (non-safety-critical) application, ensuring that safety-relevant visual information is reliably displayed, even if the main system crashes or becomes unresponsive. As such, it helps OEMs comply with safety standards like ISO 26262 (up to ASIL D), required for functional safety in automotive applications.
Conclusion
The increasing market demand for advanced functionality—such as navigation and connectivity—and, in general, for a luxury look-and-feel even on low-end two-wheelers is driving a fierce competition among OEMs to deliver more and better functionality, at lower costs—and, of course, shorter time, but for that check our related post on Rapid Prototyping. We have seen here some of the key ingredients to achieve this, available in Qt and Qt for MCUs.
If you want an even more cost-effective quick start for your next two-wheeler project, check our Eclipse Reference HMI.
Learn more about Qt in Micro-Mobility.
Typically, such "premium" features come with a cost, but today the ability to include them makes all the difference between a product that sells and one that does not.