Solar Car Telemetry: CAN to Ethernet interface

Page last updated 08 Aug 2010, by Ryan Tseng. 0 replies

The CAN network of a solar car has a ton of useful information going across it at any given time, and we want to be able to access this information externally when driving the solar car.  This calls for a wireless solution.  In the past we have used "Serial Extenders" (made by MaxStream, acquired by Digi) and XBee's for this task, but they are somewhat low bandwidth (125kb/s max for Xbee, 9.6kb/s max for old solution) and require specialized client hardware.  If we can create an ethernet interface instead of an Xbee interface for broadcasting CAN data, that would allow us to connect the solar car to an AP, and allow any laptop with a wifi card to be able to retrieve, log, and analyze the data.  The module will have the following components:

  • CAN Transceiver (MCP2551 or compatible)
  • RJ45 jack
  • SD Card slot (might as well put this in since we have an ARM that can handle it)
  • XBee connected to a UART port (As a backup and legacy uses, since we're building an Xbee based telemetry system anyways)
Updates will be made as we finalize components.

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