Building tomorrow with 60 years of experience
BOMAG is a global construction machinery manufacturer and technology partner for the road building and earthmoving industries, headquartered in Boppard, Germany. In addition to its focus on earth and asphalt rollers, planers, pavers, and walk-behind compaction technology, the company offers a complete portfolio of stabilizers or recyclers and machines for refuse compaction. The company's machines and digitisation solutions facilitate the efficient and responsible expansion of road and transport infrastructures.
BOMAG has been using Qt for more than 10 years and in 2018, with the support of Crossware, undertook the development of their award-winning, multi-device myCOCKPIT HMI. Currently, BOMAG is leveraging Qt for MCUs' startup time, robustness and cost-effectiveness to integrate myCOCKPIT with new use cases. Read their story to learn more!
1957
Foundation
2500
Employees
250
Products
Qt Solution Highlights
Cross-device development
Interaction with all operating elements and assistance functions of the machine
Display simultaneously camera systems, process parameters, and system status
Good usability and user experience for different types of operators
Compelling visuals also on MCU devices
Robustness, rapid startup time, accurate timing, thermal efficiency, and real-time control via MCU
Our myCOCKPIT HMI interacts with all operating elements and assistance functions of the machine. This enables us to operate these often very complex systems in an understandable and efficient way. For example, we are able to display various camera systems, process parameters, and system status simultaneously with a very good user experience.
Benjamin Sommer, Control System and Software Engineer, BOMAG
See myCOCKPIT in action
A Single Central Display for Every Function
Targeting a family of displays of various sizes (5", 7", and 10"), the award-winning myCOCKPIT HMI facilitates prompt navigation for tandem rollers. All important machine settings and controls are visible at a glance through this innovative HMI that can be operated via both touchscreen and rotary buttons.
BOMAG leverages Qt to turn its previous multi-monitor control system into a single central display where information that used to be distributed across various applications and screens can now be clearly visualized and acted upon. Leveraging Qt advanced graphics to implement visual animations, myCOCKPIT ensures the highest usability, efficiency, and quality from the start.
Qt technology also delivers great flexibility in terms of size optimization for different form factors, multi-widget capabilities, and easy user customization by toggling and relocating widgets.
We define good integration capability in our myCOCKPIT system as a must-have in order to maintain the same level of user experience. At the same time, we want to be able to reuse our toolchain and functions from the BOMAG middleware across our development process.
Benjamin Sommer, Control System and Software Engineer, BOMAG
Turning to Qt for MCUs
A variety of applications and devices enter BOMAG machines—depending on model, usage, capabilities—and not all need full microprocessor (MPU) capabilities. For many displays, with more limited functionalities, it's possible to rely on microcontrollers (MCU), with substantial economic gains (lower BOM) but also with technical advantages in terms of robustness, startup time, thermal efficiency, and real-time control.
BOMAG wanted to reuse as much as possible the tooling and functionality of their MPU devices on MCU, both for efficiency in implementation and for retaining a consistent user experience. The choice of Qt for MCUs was a natural one for both reasons. While fully compatible with Qt, its lightweight graphics engine ensures optimal performance on resource-constrained systems. By leveraging hardware acceleration, low memory footprint, and ultra-light UI controls, Qt for MCUs is paving the way to extending the myCOCKPIT multi-widget concept across a range of BOMAG machines, with major benefits in terms of cost and efficiency.
We would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you to Qt and Crossware. We are pleased to have two technically very competent partners here. They strongly support us with a good balance of solutions that we can use directly for our product development.
Benjamin Sommer, Control System and Software Engineer, BOMAG
About BOMAG
BOMAG is a global construction machinery manufacturer and technology partner for the road building and earthmoving industries, headquartered in Boppard, Germany. In addition to its focus on earth and asphalt rollers, planers, pavers and walk-behind compaction technology, the company offers a complete portfolio of stabilizers or recyclers and machines for refuse compaction. The company's machines and digitisation solutions facilitate the efficient and responsible expansion of road and transport infrastructures.
BOMAG has been writing history in compaction technology with innovative solutions for over 60 years and leads the industry with innovative digital services for the networked construction site. These include intelligent compaction control systems like the ASPHALT MANAGER, which the company introduced as far back as 2001, ION DUST SHIELD technology for reducing fine dust pollution during cold milling and, currently, cloud services for intelligent real-time documentation on the construction site. BOMAG machines are highly regarded in many areas of the construction industry, landscaping, agriculture, municipalities and the waste disposal and recycling industry.
Founded in 1957 as “Bopparder Maschinenbau-Gesellschaft mbH”, the company today has six branches in Germany and is globally active with 12 independent subsidiaries. With its 2,500 employees worldwide and a sales and service network of over 500 dealers in 120 countries, the company offers its customers competent and responsive service on site. BOMAG builds its machines in its own production facilities in Europe, China, India and the USA. BOMAG is part of the French Fayat Group.