Streamlining Automotive Testing with Real-Time Documentation: Kober Engineering’s Success Story with SimpleBLE
Can you imagine a production line that comes to a halt every time a worker has to log data? It sounds unthinkable; yet that’s exactly what happens during many vehicle testing workflows. Automotive testing usually faces a similar bottleneck: testers are forced to pause to manually document observations, disrupting workflows and delaying results. It’s important to keep in mind that these interruptions not only affect productivity, but also increase the risk of errors, incomplete data, and missed issues during fast-paced testing scenarios.
Faced with this challenge, Kober Engineering, a leading automotive firm with teams in both Austria and Germany, set out to build a smarter solution. The result? A hands-free audio documentation system powered by SimpleBLE. Their solution allowed testers to record findings in real time, improving efficiency, safety and keeping projects on schedule. Curious how Kober Engineering solved this challenge using SimpleBLE?
Interested in what other technical teams can take away from their approach? Let’s take a closer look.
The Problem: Too Many Pauses, Too Little Progress in Vehicle Testing Workflows
In automotive development, vehicle testing plays a critical role in validating whether key systems, such as electronic control units (ECUs) and CAN-bus interfaces, perform reliably under real-world conditions. However, traditional testing methods often lead to inefficiencies: if a tester detects a CAN-bus error during a test drive, they must pull over, retrieve a notebook or tablet, and manually log the issue. This disruption not only breaks concentration, slowing the session, but also increases the risk of missing or inaccurately recording critical data. Over time, these repeated interruptions can become a significant bottleneck in the overall testing cycle.
Kober Engineering was tasked with developing a hands-free documentation system that would allow testers to record observations without stopping the vehicle or interrupting the test. The solution had to integrate with their Linux-based in-house car computer, already connected to the vehicle’s CAN-bus, and communicate in real time with a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) peripheral to handle voice input and command execution. It needed to deliver low latency and high reliability while meeting the demanding standards of the automotive industry, and all of this had to be completed within tight project deadlines.
The Solution: Real-Time Audio Logging with Seamless BLE Integration
Without SimpleBLE, Kober Engineering would have faced the additional complexity of interfacing directly with BlueZ, Linux’s Bluetooth stack. This is done using an inter-process communication system called D-Bus. To interact with BlueZ, developers must create object representations of the Bluetooth system, using D-Bus to model BlueZ’s hierarchical structure of objects, such as adapters and devices, each identified by unique paths. BlueZ organizes its functionality internally as a tree of D-Bus objects, where each object exposes interfaces with methods and signals to handle property updates. This requires crafting D-Bus method calls, monitoring signals for events, and parsing responses, a tedious and error-prone process that wasn’t suitable given the available time to deliver the project.
Kober Engineering selected SimpleBLE for its compatibility with their Linux environment, where all the interactions with BlueZ over D-Bus were completely abstracted away in its intuitive C++ API, as well as its proven reliability in real-world applications.
The development process was straightforward. Kober integrated SimpleBLE into their system to manage communication with the BLE peripheral, which handled voice input and executed commands such as starting or stopping recordings. This allowed testers to document findings, like a CAN-bus fault or sensor anomaly, without disrupting their workflow. For instance, a tester could say “intermittent signal drop at 60 km/h” while driving, and the system would capture and store the audio for later transcription. The testing session could continue smoothly and without interruptions.
Under the hood, the implementation made full use of SimpleBLE’s capabilities, which allowed for:
- Scanning for BLE peripherals and retrieving advertised data, such as device names and signal strengths, to identify the target peripheral.
- Initiating and terminating connections to the BLE peripheral with configured timeout periods and callbacks to track connection status.
- Querying the peripheral’s services and characteristics, including their UUIDs and properties like read or write permissions.
- Subscribing to characteristic notifications to receive real-time data from the peripheral for logging during vehicle tests.
- Sending control messages to the peripheral to manage its operation.
The Results: A Reliable, Scalable BLE Integration
The results were immediate and practical:
- Improved Productivity: Hands-free documentation eliminated pauses, allowing testers to focus on driving and diagnostics. This mirrors voice-activated systems in medical settings, where doctors dictate notes during procedures to maintain efficiency.
- Faster Development: SimpleBLE’s intuitive API enabled Kober’s team to implement the solution quickly, meeting tight project deadlines. Development speed was crucial, as delays in automotive testing can ultimately delay product launches.
- Reliable Performance: The solution delivered consistent connectivity, ensuring audio recordings and commands were handled without errors, even in demanding test environments.
- Future Flexibility: While focused on Linux, SimpleBLE’s support for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android gave Kober’s team the confidence to adapt the solution to other platforms if needed.
Apply SimpleBLE to Your Projects
Kober Engineering’s experience shows how SimpleBLE can address real-world challenges in automotive testing. By enabling real-time, voice-based documentation, they improved tester productivity, accelerated development, and delivered a reliable solution that met industry standards. But this approach is not limited to the automotive sector. SimpleBLE’s versatility makes it equally valuable across a wide range of industries. With intuitive APIs, platform abstraction, and low-level control, SimpleBLE is ideal for C++ developers who need precise management of connections, services, and characteristics. Whether your project involves telemetry, remote configuration, or sensor data streaming, SimpleBLE provides a robust, production-ready foundation.
Kober’s success is a strong proof of what’s possible. Whether you’re building tools for device management or real-time monitoring, SimpleBLE offers a proven, efficient path forward.
Ready to see what SimpleBLE can do for you?
Explore how SimpleBLE can allow you to build amazing products. Check out the SimpleBLE GitHub to get started.
Footnote: About Kober-Engineering
Kober-Engineering is a small engineering firm with operations in Austria and Germany, serving the automotive industry, including major car manufacturers and their suppliers. The company specializes in software and hardware development. In Germany, its software development focuses on model-based software for electronic control units, embedded software for microcontrollers, and custom Linux-based software, with an emphasis on image processing, neural networks, and IoT applications. In Austria, Kober-Engineering handles hardware development, designing and producing custom PCBs with microcontrollers and processors tailored for automotive applications.