Smart Transit, Digital Signage, Driver Safety & Anti-Theft AI

Electronica India 2026 at BIEC, Bengaluru, gave us the perfect stage to show what the Arduino UNO Q and the Arduino Nicla Vision can really do once you put them to work on real problems. Instead of a static component display, our booth ran four fully working proof-of-concept (POC) builds side by side — a passenger information system for public transport, a touchscreen kiosk running our own website, an AI-based driver drowsiness monitor, and a wireless anti-theft sentinel for display cases.

1. Why We Brought These 4 Builds to BIEC Electronica

Electronica India is where design engineers, procurement teams, and OEMs come to see what's actually possible with today's components — not just read a datasheet. So rather than only exhibiting boards and modules on a table, we wanted visitors to walk up, tap a screen, watch a dashboard react, and see a board defend an object in real time.

All four POCs share a common thread: a single embedded board doing the job of what used to take several separate devices — display, controller, connectivity, and sensing all on one PCB. Two boards did the heavy lifting across the booth:

• Arduino UNO Q — a dual-processor board pairing a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 Linux application processor with an STM32U585 real-time microcontroller, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It ran the bus announcement system, the touchscreen kiosk, and the DriveSafe PRO drowsiness monitor.
• Arduino Nicla Vision — a 22.86 × 22.86 mm board built around an STM32H747 dual-core MCU, with an onboard camera, 6-axis IMU, Time-of-Flight sensor, microphone, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE. It powered the wireless anti-theft demo.

 2. POC 1: Smart Bus & Metro Passenger Announcement System

Modern buses and metro systems no longer just show a destination board — they combine visual information, voice announcements, route updates, and even digital advertising. Our first POC recreated exactly that: a passenger information system built around the Arduino UNO Q, a custom 10-inch HMI display, and a Bluetooth speaker.

Why the UNO Q?

The UNO Q's dual-processor design was the deciding factor: the Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 application processor handles the higher-level display and route logic, while the onboard STM32U585 microcontroller stays free for real-time, deterministic tasks. Built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth made it straightforward to drive both the HMI screen and a wireless Bluetooth speaker from one board.

Figure: The UNO Q on our custom carrier board, mounted inside the JMO Smart Panel Q10 display

Simulating a real journey

For the demo, we simulated the Bengaluru Purple Line — Baiyappanahalli → Swami Vivekananda Road → Indiranagar → Halasuru → Trinity → Mahatma Gandhi Road → Cubbon Park → Kempegowda Majestic — advancing to the next station roughly every 30 seconds and reversing direction at the terminus. Visual and audio cues stayed in sync throughout the ride:

• “Doors closing. Please stand clear of the doors.” — as the vehicle departs
• “The next station is Indiranagar. Doors will open on the left.” — approaching a station
• “We are now arriving at Indiranagar. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform.” — on arrival
• “Doors opening.” — once stopped

Built-in digital advertising

We also used the same screen to sell the idea of monetised transit displays: every so often, the passenger-information screen switches to a five-second advertising slot, with a matching promotional audio cue over the Bluetooth speaker, before automatically returning to the live route view.

Keeping the Bluetooth speaker connected on boot

A trade-show demo can't afford to sit there with no audio because the speaker didn't reconnect after power-up. We solved that with a small systemd service that waits for the Bluetooth adapter, retries the pairing, and points PulseAudio/PipeWire at the speaker once it actually appears — all before the main announcement service starts:

The service is chained with  Before=metro-av.service   so the speaker is guaranteed to be ready before the announcement engine ever tries to play audio on boot — no manual re-pairing needed between demo sessions.

Today the system advances on a 30-second timer to simulate movement, but the same event structure — Vehicle Location → Route → Current Station → Next Station → Display + Audio — is exactly what would sit behind a real GPS/GNSS feed or vehicle telemetry in production.

3. POC 2: Touchscreen Kiosk & Digital Signage on Chromium

Right next to the transit demo, visitors could walk up to a touchscreen kiosk running our own industechno.com storefront — along with a couple of live third-party dashboards — with no desktop, no login prompt, and no way to accidentally land on a file manager. It booted straight into a fullscreen browser with touch-friendly navigation between a handful of pre-selected sites.

Why the UNO Q?

The UNO Q runs a genuine Debian (Trixie) desktop with XFCE, has HDMI output, and its onboard Adreno GPU is enough to drive Chromium comfortably — all in a small, low-power, Arduino-branded footprint that can sit behind a screen indefinitely without the clutter of a full general-purpose PC. When the show is over, the same board is just as happy going back to other Arduino/embedded work.

What the finished kiosk does

• Automatically logs in and launches Chromium in fullscreen kiosk mode after power-on
• Opens a predefined website with a touchscreen navigation bar for switching between sites
• Provides Back and Refresh controls, and auto-hides the nav bar after a few seconds of inactivity
• Automatically restarts Chromium if it ever closes unexpectedly
• Runs with GPU compositing disabled for rock-solid stability during long show-floor hours

Step 1 — Set up the kiosk folder

Every kiosk-related file — the startup script and Chromium's browser profile — lives in one place:

Step 2 — A Chromium extension for the navigation bar

Rather than baking navigation into the website itself, the nav bar is a small Chromium extension — it works identically no matter which site is currently loaded, and the site list is a single array that's easy to re-brand:

Step 3 — The self-healing startup script

A short  while true   loop wraps the Chromium launch, so if the browser ever crashes or is closed, it relaunches automatically after five seconds — no one at the booth needs to notice or intervene:

Add that script to XFCE's autostart folder alongside LightDM autologin, and the boot sequence becomes fully unattended: Power ON → Autologin → XFCE → Kiosk script → Chromium fullscreen → industechno.com — no keyboard, mouse, or terminal required once it's deployed.

4. POC 3: DriveSafe PRO — AI Driver Drowsiness Monitor

Driver fatigue is one of the leading causes of road accidents worldwide, and it gives almost no warning — a driver can look perfectly normal seconds before their eyes close. Most commercial systems rely on a single signal, eyes-closed duration, which misses a driver slumped after fainting, one staring out the side window, or one with both hands off the wheel. DriveSafe PRO was our answer: a driver-monitoring dashboard running entirely on the Arduino UNO Q with nothing but a USB webcam.

Why the UNO Q?

Running face-mesh inference and hand tracking on every frame in real time needs a full OS-level ecosystem — Python, OpenCV, MediaPipe, and a proper V4L2 camera stack — which is exactly what the UNO Q's Linux-capable Qualcomm Dragonwing processor provides. The onboard microcontroller keeps the door open for the next stage of this build: driving a real buzzer or a physical speed governor on a deterministic real-time loop that's never at the mercy of the Linux scheduler or a webcam frame stall.

A rolling safety score, not a single flag

Instead of one drowsy/not-drowsy flag, DriveSafe PRO computes a continuous Driver Safety Score out of 100, built from eye closure (EAR), PERCLOS, yawning (MAR), head pose, gaze direction, posture, and hands-on-wheel detection — and every penalty is forgiven the moment the driver is provably alert again. That score is tied directly to a simulated vehicle speed limit, so the permitted speed itself drops as confidence drops.

5. POC 4: Antique Guard — Wireless Anti-Theft Sentinel

Museums, galleries, and shops with valuable display pieces all share the same problem: the object is small, the case is quiet, and by the time someone notices it's gone, so is the thief. Our fourth POC, Antique Guard, asks whether a board the size of a postage stamp can watch, listen, feel, and report — entirely on its own, with no cable attached.

Why the Nicla Vision?

The Nicla Vision packs almost everything an anti-theft monitor needs onto one tiny board: an STM32H747 dual-core MCU, a 2 MP colour camera, a 6-axis IMU, a Time-of-Flight distance sensor, a MEMS microphone, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE — with a LiPo battery connector, charger, and fuel gauge built in. No wiring between separate modules to loosen or fail, and it runs for hours on a small 3.7 V 200 mAh cell.

Everything over Wi-Fi — no cable required

Once running, the board joins the network and serves its own dashboard, video stream, and control endpoints directly:

Alerts also go out as a UDP broadcast on port 9999, so a PC, Raspberry Pi, or phone app on the same network can listen for alarms without polling the board — and if the configured Wi-Fi network isn't available, the board falls back to its own hotspot so the dashboard is still reachable from a phone right next to the case.

6. Side-by-Side: Which Board Powers What