Development of an Electric Vehicle Arduino-like Open-source Platform – EVduino

During the last decade the usage of Embedded System in automotive applications is increased extraordinarily and even in a chip shortage period the trend is to replace classical mechanical system. With this vision, in the following work of thesis will be discussed the development of EVduino, an open-source Vehicle Management Unit with its environment, for automotive applications. The basic idea is to provide the users the possibility of developing applications with the flexibility of model-based design through Simulink with the capability to embed software in an Arduino-like fashion. The fundamental starting point is the ISO 26262 standard for functional safety in road vehicles, in which is described the development of a product in each phase. The final goal is to improve the functionality range of the EVduino itself in order to include a library that can manage CAN protocol, that is a vehicle bus designed to implement the communications between the microcontroller and other devices without a host computer. The custom board used was developed by Ideas&Motion s.r.l equipped with Aurix Infineon TC277TP processor, specifically designed for safety critical applications. The CAN Application software C code written starting from Infineon's low-level drivers, keeps the advantages of Arduino, also it is not only limited to single task execution, but thanks to Erika Enterprise RTOS, more tasks can be executed at different frequencies, moreover its integration with HighTec IDE provides necessary features such as Rate Monotonic Scheduling for the task execution. At this point, there is the need of provide a visual approach to the functions, this leads to the previous mentioned library adaptation for the purpose of creating Simulink blocks for EVduino input and outputs using MATLAB Legacy Code Tool. To sum up, the user is now capable of designing custom Simulink models with CAN communication blocks, tune parameters of the model and log CAN messages, for example with an external tool used as a receiving or transmitting node. The final step is to automatically generate a C code thanks to the Embedded Coder (that is an extension of Simulink and MATLAB coder), which can be imported in the IDE so that the custom board can perform the execution. This kind of approach is especially efficient due to the fact that reduces the introduction of bugs of human nature and, most of all, accelerates the software development process, for instance giving the possibility of integrating new functions into previous version of the code.