Recently CiA447’s functionality was enhanced and especially the new power-down and wake-up procedures required a version step upwards, as they are not backward compatible.

Today, Daimler is the only manufacturer already offering cars with CiA447 interface. However, several other car manufacturers have already shown prototypes.

One of the biggest benefits of CiA447 is, that it offers add-on electronics access to some of the cars displays and buttons. In modern cars, there is typically no physical room to add electronics near the dashboard, as all space is used up. CiA447 allows “sharing” some of the cars displays and buttons, so that the electronic components themselves do not need to be mounted near the dashboard.

We at ESAcademy have now updated all our CANopen products for CiA447 to implement the latest V2.0 enhancements and changes. This includes our Micro CANopen source code solutions, our CANopen Magic line of analyzers and our CiA447 gateway simulator. Contact us, if you need to bring CiA447 to your electronics.

The limits of speed vs. cable length comes from the requirement, that in CAN a bit needs to be stable on the entire bus, before the next bit may start. Some bits can be over-written, a feature which is used for arbitration, acknowledgments and error handling.

Bosch, the inventor of CAN, now introduced a white paper “CAN with Flexible Data-Rate” showing how a higher data rate can be achieved. The main suggested feature here is to allow switching between a low (backward compatible) bit rate and a much higher bit rate within a single message.

In short, a single CAN message consist of control data at the beginning and the end of a message with the data field “in the middle”. The core idea is to use the lower bit rate for the control data and the higher bit rate for the data field only. In addition the maximum data field size is increased from previously 8 bytes to now 64 bytes.

If the higher bit rate is 8 times higher than that of the base rate it would be possible to achieve an 8 times higher data-throughput WITHOUT changing the real-time behavior.

For more info, see the white paper at:
www.semiconductors.bosch.de/media/pdf/canliteratur/can_fd.pdf

• More clarity and easier maintenance in user-configurable files by dividing call back functions into multiple files
• More flexibility by adding many more data call backs for SDO accesses
• Framework support to guard Object Dictionary entries with auto-generated minimum and maximum values from EDS/DCF file

Customers with ongoing maintenance agreement with us are entitled to a free upgrade. In this case, please download the new version from

CANopenStore.com/support.php

using the activation code(s). For those projects using auto-generated code, also update CANopen Architect EDS to the latest version.

The process to update embedded firmware libraries that become part of a bigger project can be complicated. For that reason, we have developed tools and to ease this on-time task.

Contact us if you are interested in obtaining or need assistance in performing the update.

The standard supports electronic devices used in taxis, emergency response vehicles and other governmental service vehicles. Typical components include roof bars (light & sound), radios, control units, taximeters, printers and similar devices.

Using a CiA447 gateway, automotive manufacturers like Daimler already provide access to the vehicles internal data today. The standard allows sharing some of the car’s resources like switches and displays with CiA447 devices. A steering wheel button can be used as the PTT (push to talk) button for a radio, which in return can use the car’s display to show channel numbers, volume settings or such.

ESAcademy now provides a CiA447 gateway simulation software, which greatly eases the development of CiA447 compatible devices. Engineers no longer need the car or a physical mock-up of the gateway to work on their developments. The gateway simulation is based on the same software that is used in the gateways of various automotive manufacturers. It allows CiA447 compatible devices to access the cars’ data, like dashboard components (buttons, displays).

The simulation can also ‘re-play’ tours, which are simulations of drives along a specific route. The tour data visible on the network includes engine and location (GPS) data.

The software is available at http://www.canopenstore.eu/CiA447GatewaySim (European Union) and http://www.canopenstore.com/pip/cia-447-gateway-simulation.html (rest of the world).

Visit the Texas Instruments site MSP430 LaunchPad (MSP-EXP430G2) to learn more.

Included are .NET assemblies for each of the driver DLLs used by Flash Magic. The API has been designed to take advantage of .NET features such as exceptions while maintaining familiarity for those already working with the existing C-based API.

The users of these new .NET assemblies allow developers to quick start working with Flash Magic technologies using the .NET language of their choice.

View a comparison table (scroll down) showing the differences between the new product and the existing Flash Magic Production System.

After the ARM7 and ARM9 generation it is now the ARM Cortex-M processors that are going broad market, more and more chip manufacturers offer and promote derivatives of this architecture. One of the leading “embracers” of the Cortex-Mx is NXP. On the lowest end of this family NXP offers Cortex-M0 derivatives which are aimed at replacing 8 and 16bit microcontrollers and are best suited for lowest power applications. The Cortex-M3 devices are considered mid range and on the high end is the Cortex-M4 offering DSP extensions. Note that the Cortex-M4 was just recently announced and it will take a while until implementations become widely available.

As a tutor conducting various ARM trainings and being involved in tests, benchmarks and reports I am always amazed about how this industry works when promoting performance differences between microcontrollers. Looking at ARM7, ARM9 and Cortex-M variants they indeed have a different performance at the same clock rate, but none of these differences come even close to a factor of two.

In our report Performance Considerations for ARM processor based developments (available at www.esacademystore.eu) we outline where the really big traps and gaps are when trying to boost real-world performance, and it’s not the architecture sub-species. We can show that single decisions that engineers make when developing an embedded application can impact the performance by a factor of ten or more. Selecting a specific ARM processor architecture versus another family pales by comparison.

Of course, there are always some applications where exactly that difference is the one needed to make it work. But for the most part, the majority of embedded applications  do not have a very specific performance need and any ARM based microcontroller will do the job and more. Unless, of course, one makes too many bad choices in designing the application. Even the best processor performance can be nullified by poor software!

So even if ARM processors are now “everywhere”, for developers of embedded systems the selection criteria is the same as always: good development tools, right peripheral mix, availability, pricing, trusted partners – your priorities may vary…

Last year, Raisonance released products following a slightly different concept they named Primers, and the Primer2 won an EETimes product of the year 2009 award. These boards feature a complete housing, making them more attractive for various prototype developments. Through staging several design contests, many applications have been implemented and are now shared on the product’s web page. Applications include an alcohol meter, a CAN monitor, a GPS displaying OpenStreetMap data, various games and many more.

At this years Embedded World, Raisonance introduced the next generation, the Open4 Primer. The most obvious changes are that the new housing is a bit bigger and gives a much sturdier impression. It offers more room for custom extensions as the space for daughter boards is bigger as well. The color display with touchscreen is about twice the size of the previous version, providing more screen space for visualizations. All primers use microcontrollers from ST, the latest Open4 has an STM32E which is a Cortex-M3 derivative.

There is hardly a more fun platform to evaluate a Cortex-M3 microcontroller.

This year, one of the Embedded Awards given out every year at the Embedded World is for a product that helps engineers with measuring the power consumption of their system dynamically. The PowerScale by Hitex not only allows measuring a system’s current power consumption – it makes that information available via an API so that debuggers can include the information into the trace recording or other displays.

This allows engineers to easily determine which code areas have an impact on the overall power consumption. The power-saving effect of reducing clock rates or disabling unused peripherals becomes immediately visibile.

Various adapter probes including a USB and Power-over-Ethernet Probe are available to allow for an easy connection of the up to four channels to the target hardware.