CANopen Diagnostics in Maritime Vessel Automation

What problem did you solve?

We were experiencing faulty CANopen receive-PDO data in our system, which in turn caused wider issues in the vessel. This made it critical and urgent to log CAN bus traffic to trace the root cause. The system relates to automation & navigation in maritime vessels, specifically a CMA CGM ship. Our system controls valves, sensors, emergency stop and everything related to the engine. Inputs from many different systems come to us and we then provide an interface for controlling everything.

How did you solve it?

We used the CANedge1 CAN bus data logger with SD card to collect the raw CANopen data. The device was installed for a period until the error occurred again. We then extracted the data via the logger SD card and analyzed it in the asammdf GUI tool.

As part of this, we created a CAN database (DBC file) for decoding our data into physical values. This was done by converting our CANopen EDS file (Electronic Data Sheet) into a DBC using an automated process suggested by CSS Electronics. In addition, we analyzed the raw CANopen frames. Based on the analyses we determined that the faulty data was in fact data from another system than ours, which produced a PDO message with a faulty data payload (data from one frame overflowed into another frame). This was an insight we couldn not have achieved without detailed logging.