Vehicle Predictive Maintenance [CAN Event Detection]

What problem did you solve?

Wallis Drilling designs, builds and operates drill rigs that are deployed to remote locations across Australia. These rigs rely on PLCs communicating over CAN bus networks to manage critical control functions. When issues occur in the field, diagnosing the underlying cause can be challenging. Engineers have limited visibility into live CAN traffic during real-world operations and reproducing intermittent behaviours in a workshop environment is often not feasible. With rigs spread across remote locations, deploying engineers onsite for diagnosis is costly and inefficient.

How did you solve it?

We installed CANedge2 devices on our drilling rigs to continuously capture CAN data from our PLC systems. The devices automatically upload log files with raw CAN data to our cloud. To support detailed analysis, we developed custom signal databases (DBC files) tailored to our PLC programs and integrated the data into Grafana dashboards for both real-time and historical visibility. To enable internet connectivity in the remote locations we deploy in, the CANedge2 connects to Starlink WiFi routers in our vehicles.

As part of the workflow, we also leverage the plug & play event detection option: When data is received from rigs in the field, it is automatically analysed to monitor for specific operational conditions. This allows us to proactively identify rigs that require maintenance and detect any anomalies. Alerts are promptly issued over Microsoft Teams to key engineering, maintenance and operational personnel in a matter of minutes.

What benefit has this led to?

Reviewing CAN bus data from the field has allowed us to refine control algorithms to make them more robust and fault tolerant. Improvements can now be made in a much shorter time frame, without sending engineers to remote locations to reproduce scenarios and manually collect data. Real-time alerts provide immediate visibility into unusual behaviour, enabling our personnel (both in the field and remotely) to prioritise attention where it is needed most. This enables a shift from reactive troubleshooting to proactive intervention. Further, the data allows our engineers to review precise message sequences and signal activity surrounding any operational event.

Why did you choose the CANedge?

The wireless connectivity (WiFi/4G) was essential for our remote sites - we needed automatic data collection without manual SD card handling. The direct cloud integration meant we could start capturing and analysing CAN data quickly without building custom hardware interfaces. The ability to remotely update device configurations OTA saved us significant travel time to remote sites for testing different logging setups.

   — Steven Liang, Engineer