The main object of the project was to expand the simulator capabilities in the direction of communication, in particular develop the Controller Area Network. CAN bus communication is an high performance protocol very popular for automotive, industrial environments, and high speed networks as well as low cost multiplex wiring.
Initially I started working on real landtiger boards. The aim of the first part was to create an application that allow the transmission of points written on one board to another one through CAN bus. The second board after receiving points recreates the same drawing on its own display.
What is indispensable:
- 2 x landtiger boards.
- Keil uVision
- Some wires
- 2 x Ulink 2
- 2 x power pack
Expanding simulator capabilites
The second part of the project is related to expand the simulator in order to allow the communication through CAN bus. In order to do so I used C++ and visual studio IDE, keil application note 154 beyond the user manual of the LPC176x.
After more than one instances of the simultor are opened you can choose to interconnect them by means of folders. The idea is to recreate the connection of wires in the real world. Two or more instances that want to communicate have to share the same folder.
In order to differentiate multiple CAN connection I used colors, multiple CAN connected together share the same color beyond the same folder.
For testing purpose the transmission of points is used as on the real boards.