CAN Based Real-Time Vehicle Monitoring System

New cars today come with a wide variety of electronic control units (ECUs) that need to communicate with each other in both an efficient and reliable way. Using traditional wire harnesses creates more complexity and less flexibility to the system. To help solve these issues, the Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol has become very common in the automotive industry. This paper discusses the design and development of an actual real-time vehicle monitoring system (VMS) utilizing the CAN protocol. The proposed system allows multiple sensor nodes to communicate with a central monitoring station (CMS) via CAN bus. Many parameters of the vehicle are being measured and transmitted in real-time to allow quick and accurate monitoring. The system was created using a microcontroller in an embedded system with the capability of supporting CAN communication modules. The results of the experiments demonstrate that the proposed system provides reliable data transfer with zero latency and high fault tolerance. Therefore, the proposed system is demonstrated to be a very efficient, scalable, and low-cost solution for automotive monitoring systems.