Can Bus Communication Demonstration Tool for Education

Intelligent vehicles is a fast developing area. For the internal combustion engines are 150 years of dead-end road of vehicle technology - which 150 years are still counting - the greatest development in vehicle industry can now be seen in self driving technology. The demand on intelligent solutions is the fastest area in this industry. Intelligent solutions are requiring reliable communication channels. The most widely used vehicle communication is the Controller Area Network (CAN). The CAN (bus) is a communication protocol between the different control units in the car, where the controllers (computers) can exchange information directly (without a direct link unit between them) and it is a protocol based on the principle of messages. Each message has its own structure consisting of Message-ID, message start, message body, and end of the message. CAN messages do not contain the address of the sender or the addressee, but the content of the message itself contains an additional identifier for the information transmitted like RPM, temperature, etc. In this paper, we will propose an implementation of an education tool to demonstrate the principle of a CAN bus protocol. The demonstration tool comes with sensors, actuators, LCD, LED, input, and output functions. This tool will simplify the idea of how the CAN bus sends messages in the data bus with the priority of the order. Also, it will support the theoretical knowledge of the CAN bus by a practical demonstration of it.