Design and Development of a Vehicle Monitoring System Using CAN Protocol

Abstract: Nowadays economical automobiles are developed by more of electro mechanical parts with analog interface for efficient & cost effective operation. Generally a vehicle is built with an analog driver-vehicle interface for indicating various vehicle statuses like speed, fuel level, engine temperature etc. This paper presents a design & development of cost effective solution for digital driving interface with a semi-autonomous vehicle improving the driver-vehicle interaction with increase in safety. Our designed system uses a PIC Microcontroller based data acquisition system that uses in built ADC to gather data from analog sensors to digital format and visualize them to the vehicle driver through a LCD display. The communication module used here is an embedded network bus CAN, which has efficient data transfer. Experimental data with a prototype is obtained for various vehicle parameters like vehicle speed, engine temperature and fuel level in the tank which are compatible with a real time system.

Keywords: Controller area network (CAN), Vehicle Sensors, PIC Microcontroller, Communication Module.