The trend for headlights with animation when the lights are switched on and off is becoming increasingly common in the automotive industry. These animations often require a headlamp containing a controller and software, which is very expensive and time-consuming to develop. Using dedicated integrated circuits, commands can be sent from the car's controller, thus eliminating the use of software in the headlamp itself.
As part of our thesis, we have studied and tested the operation of these integrated circuits at Hella Saturnus Slovenia and built a headlamp based on them. The integrated circuits used were TPS929120 and TPS92664. Their communication is based on the UART (universal asynchronous receiver transmitter) protocol, but they differ in message structure.
The aim of the thesis is to design a headlamp that connects both devices to a single communication line and send messages to control the LEDs. It turns out that a message intended for the first integrated circuit causes an error or misinterpretation for the second. Possible solutions are sending only one byte, restarting the communication, or sending messages with different frequencies.
Keywords: Headlight, LED drivers, UART
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