Design and Implementation of CANopen - SAE J1939 Communication Gateway

Abstract: Since the introduction of CAN (Controller Area Network), it has become the de-facto standard communication bus for in-vehicle networks. Several higher layer protocols are developed based on CAN to fit various application domains. SAE J1939 is the standard for communication in heavy-duty vehicles. CANopen was initially designed for industrial automation, but quickly has been adopted in other industrial domains,including vehicles. Due to the various application areas of CANopen,many CANopen devices are available on the market. In order to integrate these off-the-shelf devices into a J1939 network, a communication gateway is required. This thesis project briefly presents the CAN bus and two higher layerprotocols – SAE J1939 and CANopen. As the existing proposals of CANopen– J1939 gateway device profiles do not fit the purpose of integrating arbitrary or unmodified CANopen devices into the J1939 network, we design a communication gateway to serve this purpose. The gatewaysoftware is prototyped on an STM32F107 development board using the Cprogramming language. Several mapping table structures are proposed and implemented to bridge the two protocols. These mapping tables can bechanged by the existing calibration tools over the CAN bus during the runtime. In this way, the gateway can be configured to support different connection setups of the connected devices.