A Detailed Comparison: IXXAT CANopen Stack vs. CANFestival CANopen Stack Student: Ian Tracy Faculty Advisor: Dr. John Lacourse Professional Supervisor: Josh Pearl Courses Involved: ECE562, ECE649, CS410 Current Date: 10/20/2012 Finish Date: 4/1/2012

CANopen CANopen is a flexible higher layer communication protocol standard Also is a device profile specification for embedded systems Based on Controller Area Network (CAN) bus Used in a verity of applications Low cost high performance Standardized by CAN in Automation (CiA) Specification 301, 302

CANFestival Free CANopen framework Initiated by Eouard Tisserant in 2001 Runtime code licensed LGPLv2 Provides an ANSI-C platform independent stack Provides some GUI and command line tools to create a new node, and edit an object dictionary http://www.canfestival.org/

The Problem CANFestival is a free alternative to IXXAT’s CANopen Software IXXAT’s hardware competitors support CANFestival If IXXAT supports CANFestival it could possibly reduce software sales, but could increase hardware sales

The Goals Write a wrapper layer that will allow CANFestival to work with IXXAT CAN hardware Thoroughly test the CANFestival software stack for performance Identify any CANopen features that are not implemented in CANFestival or the IXXAT CANopen stack Determine which software is easier to use Compare CANFestival running with IXXAT’s hardware to CANFestival running with a competitors hardware

Software Block Diagram CANFestival Application Wrapper layer VCINPL. Dll VCISRV.SYS IXXAT Interface Hardware

Test Program To determine how the CANFestival stack compares to IXXAT’s CANopen stack a test program will be written Written as a C++ program and run on a separate test computer 3 different test iterations Test CANFestival software with IXXAT hardware Test IXXAT CANopen software with IXXAT hardware Test CAN Festival software with a competitor’s hardware Test Computer CANopen stack USB -CAN CAN bus

Testing Performance Test program will use timestamps generated from active CAN interface of test computer Test a verity of CANopen messages Test will place messages on bus at an increasing rate until an overrun is generated Test for jitter of cyclically transmitted messages

Features Test Test computer will assume role of client, while the computer running the CANopen stack will assume the role of server Current Version of IXXAT test document has 20+ feature tests All features tested are specified in CiA documents 301 and 302 Additionally, CiA has provided a list of the top 14 most erroneous CANopen implementations

Questions?