DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATIONAL CAN FD AND AUTOMOTIVE ETHERNET BOARDS

In the evolving automotive industry, communication systems are crucial for enhancing safety, improving efficiency, and offering convenience and entertainment for both drivers and passengers. Consequently, modern vehicles are equipped with a complex network of electronic control units (ECUs), sensors, and actuators, often referred to as modules, distributed and embedded throughout the vehicle. This network, with an ever-increasing number of ECUs and their communication signals, requires more robust and time-efficient communication. This is particularly important in automotive manufacturing, as vehicles become increasingly dependent on reliable electronic networks and systems to support advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Therefore, it is critical to equip engineers and technicians with the skills to handle these systems. To address this need, a hands-on course on in-vehicle communication protocols was recently developed in the author’s program at Michigan Tech and designed to ensure that students graduate with these essential skills. The course’s laboratory experiments were initially developed to cover classic controller area networks (CAN) and local interconnect network (LIN). It did not cover controller area network flexible data rate (CAN FD) or automotive Ethernet, which are becoming more prevalent in the automotive industry. One of the main reasons for the lack of experiments in CAN-FD and automotive Ethernet was the relatively high cost for nodes and supporting equipment. Furthermore, to the best of the author’s knowledge, there are no automotive Ethernet development platforms beyond the evaluation boards offered by semiconductor manufacturers. The goal of this current study was to develop low-cost products to allow the teaching of new generation industry automotive communication protocols. To accomplish this goal, it was necessary to design, manufacture, and test both a standalone CAN FD shield for Arduino and a shield with automotive Ethernet capabilities, in addition to CAN functionality.