Monitoring CAN performances in distributed embedded systems

The paper presents a new module devoted to provide a refined monitoring of the traffic on a CAN bus. The real-time application in charge with message CAN communication is developed in compliance with FreeRTOS and dsPIC33. It is connected by a serial interface with the PC host application. Unlike other similar existing devices, the new CAN monitor extracts enriched information regarding the error and overload frames, it detects the overdue RTR message responses and permits various display filtering options. In addition, the CAN monitor estimates the current CAN bandwidth, thus giving the possibility to foresee potential bus overloading situations. These services are targeted to facilitate the debugging and the exploitation of CAN-based applications, as experimentally illustrated.