30/12/2024
/// Modern vehicles, especially prototypes, are equipped with increasing amounts of sensors and ECUs, producing ever-growing amounts of data, and our prototype race car is no exception to that rule. Combined with our initial efforts to implement Driverless functionality and more detailed state information, the 2024 season faced a potential bus traffic multiplication.
Since the design of the past season already had high bus load, our natural decision was to distribute communication across multiple buses to overcome that bottleneck. As a side effect, this setup even enabled us to isolate and group bus participants by their importance.
Since it was not possible to group participants in a way that avoided routing messages between buses without implementing multiple interfaces on some devices, we ultimately decided on a star topology of six buses. As the head — and thus gateway node — our decision fell on a recent Raspberry Pi, which enabled us to additionally log, process, and even transmit data during our runs.
While looking for CAN-to-USB interfaces that suited our needs, we came across the USBcan Light 4xHS interfaces from Kvaser, which support four CAN interfaces per device in a manageable form factor.
We want to thank Kvaser for supporting our team and helping us further our ambitions both on and off track. The cooperation is a great asset for RUB Motorsport and our aim to innovate in all areas of our car. For more information heat to https://kvaser.com/.
