Marussia Motors Cars

The Marussia B1 is Russia’s first supercar. Designed and built in-house by the exceptionally talented team at the state-of-the-art Marussia Motors production facility in Moscow, the B1 combines a strong and distinctive character with cutting edge engineering. Following in the great supercar tradition, the B1 is a powerful and lightweight mid-engined, two-seater, yet thanks to our philosophy of melding extreme performance with luxury the B1 is trimmed with the finest natural materials and equipped state-of-the-art electronics. It will also remain exclusive, thanks to a limited production run of just 2999 cars.

An evolution of Russia’s first supercar, the B2 is an overt expression of capabilities and ambition. Cleverly styled to mimic the ‘M’ of the Marussia logo, the B2 has an incredibly powerful face. Satin black paintwork emphasises the hungry intakes and geometric elements to the grille and headlamp apertures, while deeply recessed intakes ahead of the rear wheels add to the B2 insectile appearance.

Mentorel Project Description

Getting creative – custom electronics & a flexible instrument panel GUI for the Marussia B2

The creators of the Marussia B2 sportscar wanted to create a car that was stunning in every way… engine power, exterior and interior design. The car must stand-out, inside and out, and Marussia required something a little more special than the standard driver instrument panels available in the market. The company came to Mentorel in search of custom electronics & a flexible instrument panel GUI solution.

The challenge – a client looking for something unique

A completely customized and original driver instrument panel GUI was what was required for the Marussia B2 and Mentorel’s engineers’ experience with previous similar automotive and industrial projects meant it was possible. Possible, but a challenge that required a lot of engineering creativity. Given the revolutionary new approach, engineers were forced to start from scratch and to use their imagination, designing a completely new instrument panel.
Custom instrument panel Design Brief from Marussia

• The instrument panel must be a LCD display, with easy to change skins, rather than the standard arrow gauges.
• The overall design must be flexible, and capable of being tailored to each customer’s wishes.

Mentorels’ creative solution

Part 1: Custom Electronics – Mentor’s engineering team overcomes a lack of documentation
Designing the custom electronics was a major challenge due to the lack of manufacturer documentation about the Renault engine’s electronics. Our engineers love a challenge though and immediately got stuck in, analyzing the electric signals coming from the engine with an oscilloscope and various other special devices. After the research and some testing and brainstorming, the engineers decided that a microcontroller which could monitor the car’s state and gather the information from the engine’s bus combined with an ARM9-based GUI subsystem was the best way to go. In terms of connection, both modules of the instrument panel are connected with an UART net over which the MCU and ARM9 interact with a custom protocol.

Part 2: Instrument panel GUI design – using existing hardware and developing better solutions
Testing by our engineers and further brainstorming and whiteboarding found that the best way to visualize the GUI was to use Mentorel’s existing OEM module, the SBC-9263, a module Mentorel has previously provided to Russian OEM companies thus saving on costs for the manufacturer.

Notes on the SBC-9263 module: The SBC-9263 module is based on the Atmel at91sam9263 running at 200 MHz and has 64M of SDRAM and 64M of Spansion NOR flash. The Atmel MPU has an extremely flexible embedded LCD controller into which STN or TFT displays can be connected. The display used in Marussia’s instrument panel is a 16 bit color TFT-LCD with 800x600px resolution and can operate at extreme temperatures ranging from -30 to +85°C.

Finally, the GUI software was implemented with a cross-platform application development framework Qt 4.5.1 for embedded Linux.

Final outcome – a creative, cost-effective solution for a high performance sporstcar

Mentorel’s engineers delivered the project on time and within budget and our inventive solution featured in the Marussia B2, which was launched at the Frankfurt International Motor Show in 2009. Not for the first time, engineers at our company cleverly combined some new ideas and existing solutions to deliver what the customer needed. If you’re an automotive company with custom electronics needs please contact us and we’ll see what kinds of cost-effective solutions we can provide.