Hardware-in-the-loop Communication Interface

Abstract

A system has been designed to perform real-time transmission, between a master node and single slave node, of two kinds of protocols, EtherCAT and CAN FD. Implementing such a system requires the design of a PCB for EtherCAT and CAN FD communication interface and to achieve protocol conversion in C. The system is able to perform message transmission successfully and correctly in most test cases except that unstable results occur when 64 bytes CAN FD message is transmitted. Other aspects of the system including message frame encapsulation, bit time and voltage are verified, indicating the system is reliable in principle. There are several potential further developments for this system, among which improving it into multi-slave message broadcast mode is the most interesting since such a mode is more flexible and closer to realistic needs.