Hi all! I am currently working on a car rebuild project and as part of it, I want to use a power distribution module to control inputs and outputs in the cars electrical system. For a couple of reasons (mainly because the PDU I want to use will only accept 16 analogue inputs), I would like to pass some of the switch states (on or off) to the PDU via CAN BUS. The PDU (a PDUx3 from Life Racing) will accept loads of "soft" inputs so this should solve my problem nicely.
I have about 20 inputs that I would like to convert and send via CAN bus, so I'm thinking of building a small PCB powered by a Teensy Arduino. I am wondering if anyone has done anything like this for me to get a leg up on starting? My thought would be to run a 5v signal to all switches as well as the arduino, then read the switch positions of the 20 or so inputs and convert them to a CAN transmission. While I have experience with a FlexCAN CAN reader on another part of my build, I have not yet tried to create any messages for transmission via the CAN system. Is anyone able to advise on this to help me get started? Thanks very much in advance!
It's no problem reading tons of inputs and spit the values out on a CAN bus. Who will be asking for them, who will be reading them?
The CAN bus, as I have used it, handles PDOs, Periodic Data Objects and SDOs, requested data objects. Where does Your CAN bus data fit?
Page 20 shows how to set up the CAN input. Does this look familiar? If you have any examples of building a transmission of the right type for this to receive then I would be really interested to learn from it and hopefully end up building something that works
The unit shown above in the link. It's a solid state power distribution module, so it will need to be set up to associate certain can messages with the input states of the 20 or so variables I want to pass to the unit. Once interpreted then I can set up what those inputs control in terms of outputs.
I'll have a proper read of the manual tomorrow to try to understand more about the input format expected by the unit, but I would have thought the process to build and transmit a piece of data should be relatively standardised? Or am I being optimistic? My thought was that the message format was standard and I just needed to understand the address ranges etc to set up the send and receive side. Is this not how it works??
Yes I'll start looking how to set up the PDU to receive messages and relate those to inputs, but is there some form of standard or example of creating and sending data via arduino? I'd really like something to study and start to get my head around.
