Sometimes a company needs a quick start, but whether it’s a large enterprise or a start-up, a quick start is sometimes easier said than done. This was the challenge Clean Motion had to overcome when building the human-machine interface (HMI) for its last-mile delivery, urban electric vehicle, EVIG. In turning to Qt Accelerate, Clean Motion found the easy button for deploying its HMI solution within a single week.
When platforms challenge creativity
Clean Motion’s story started in 2010 in Lerum, on the west coast of Sweden, with a mission to find a solution for sustainable transport in urban environments. Fast forward to today and it now has a transportation solution suited for daily use, with a vehicle that is far from your traditional three-wheeler cargo. Fully electrified, solar-powered and connected to a fleet management system, it’s the model child of how digitalisation and software integration can foster sustainability while promoting a premium design.
But this elegance needed to be matched with functionality by way of an HMI that equips drivers with a wide range of information, including speed, cargo weight, battery range, charging status and more. Connectivity and remote monitoring via fleet management, in particular, were deemed to be defining features of this state-of-the-art vehicle. In Clean Motion’s case, the HMI had to accomplish all of the above while also matching the clean, minimalistic Scandinavian style that the company had built its brand on.
“We built our first HMI for our EV with an off-the-shelf platform offering basic functionality but soon realised we had limited control over UX [user experience], layout or design. We wanted a clean Nordic design, but we needed to move the project forward quickly,” said William Collings, CTO, Clean Motion. “Qt Accelerate made it possible to create a stylish and functional HMI within our system. We set up a one-week boot camp with Qt to create our HMI based on Qt Accelerate’s templates. Within a week, we hadn’t just designed the UI [user interface]/UX but already had a stable system deployed and integrated within our vehicle.”
From concept to market in a week
Typically, switching to an entirely new development framework may severely impact production on many aspects ranging from talent to hardware and ultimately poses risks on time-to-market and costs. Fortunately, around the time that Clean Motion was seeking a solution, the software framework vendor, Qt Group, had just developed a low-code tool called Qt Accelerate, which would offer an express lane solution to building applications in digital products.
Unlike the tools Clean Motion had already trialled beforehand, Qt Accelerate featured predefined templates for user interfaces that were tailored out-of-the-box to work optimally with a variety of use cases like industrial manufacturing, consumer electronics and crucially, mobility. Built on the popular Qt Framework, one of the most significant benefits of Qt Accelerate was that it required little to no custom code expertise on Clean Motion’s part. These industry-grade templates were essentially ready to deploy, and additionally, allowed Clean Motion to customise its look, feel and functionality.
“With Qt Accelerate we regained full control and ownership of our software, as we were able to address specific pain points in terms of turnaround and capabilities,” said Collings. “It is a viable commercial offering. It gave us quick, frictionless access to advanced HMI functionality out of the box and because its foundation is the Qt framework, it inherits the cross-platform scalability, which is super important for us because it means we can reuse our solution down the line for other products if we want. It’s also entirely open to further customisation, adaptation and upgrades.”
A paradigm shift
With Qt Accelerate, Clean Motion’s team was able to deploy its intended design system and desired HMI functionality in a week by leveraging the design-to-code conversion of Qt Bridges, Boot-to-Qt for quick deployment, Qt Insights for analytics and reporting and much more.
Collings said: “Navigating the wide variety of development platforms, hardware and talent requirements for modern software and devices can be daunting, especially for small/medium companies or enterprises in the early stages of digitalisation. It was a great relief to discover that Qt Group has released Qt Accelerate to help organisations quick-start their industrial HMI development.”
Qt Accelerate was designed to deliver a 99%-ready solution that just needed customisation in terms of the design system, branding and selected functionality. To help Clean Motion get over the finish line, Qt Group ran a one-week boot camp with the team’s designers, engineers and product team that brought its vision to life.
“Our plan is to rapidly scale the number of industries we cover and provide even more out-of-the-box functionality and reference platforms while condensing bootcamp sessions to one to two days,” said Petteri Holländer, Senior Vice President, Ventures, Qt Group. “Qt Accelerate is about empowering creators to turn ideas into innovative products in days, no matter the time or resource constraints. Building any software-defined product from scratch can be an involved process. It takes coding, designing, deciding which software and hardware to use, etc. With Qt Accelerate, you don’t have to start from scratch or hire a full engineering team before you have a working product to trial. You get a starting point that’s almost done and risk-free because it’s quality-assured from the ground up. After just one week of customisation, you are easily looking at a version 1.0 product launch.”