A CANopen interface for substituting a proprietary communication protocol in custom hardware devices

Abstract

We consider a system architecture where the communication between the remote devices and a central controller is done using a custom application protocol on top of CAN. CANopen is a communication protocol based on CAN that has proven to be open source and easily customizable for specific applications. The goal of this project is to replace the existing custom application protocol with CANopen to evaluate its feasibility and performance. The project has been divided into three different blocks to achieve the main objective. In the first one, the CANopen advantages against the custom protocol characteristics are exposed. The description of the firmware implementation and its validation is done in the second part. In the third block of the thesis, a comparison between the CANopen theoretical, the legacy protocol and the calculated throughput from the implementation is carried out. The CANopen feasibility in the application under study has been demonstrated considering that the protocol has been implemented and validated in an engine and in a custom remote device. Additionally, the performance evaluation indicates that CANopen outstands the legacy protocol, since it permits having a higher maximum throughput.