Development of a CAN-based Real-time Simulator for Car Body Control

This paper presents a developing procedure of the CAN-based real-time simulator for car body control, aiming at replacing the actual W/H (Wiring Harness) and J/B(Junction Box) couple eventually. The CAN protocol, as one kind of field-bus communication, defines the lowest 2 layers of the ISO/OSI standard, namely, the physical layer(PL) and the data link layer(DLL), for which the CSMA/NBA protocol is generally adopted. For CPU, two PIC18Fxx8x's are used because of their built-in integration of CAN controller, large internal FLASH memory (48K or 64K), and their costs. To control J/B's and actuators, 2 controller boards are separately implemented, between which CAN lines communicate through CAN transceivers MCP255. A power motor for washing windshield, 1 door lock motor, and 6 blink lamps are chosen for actuators of the simulator for the first stage. For the software architecture, a polling method is used for the fast global response time despite its slow individual response time. To improve the individual response time and to escape from some eventual trapped-function loops, High/Low ports of the CPU are simply used, which increases the stability of the actuator modules. The experimental test shows generally satisfactory results in normal transmitting / receiving function and message trace function. This simulator based on CAN shows a promising usefulness of lighter, more reliable and intelligent distributed body control approach than the conventional W/H and J/B couple. Another advantage of this approach lies in the distributed control itself, which gives better performance in hard real-time computing than centralized one, and in the ability of integrating different modules through CAN.