Low-Cost Data Acquisition System for Automotive Electronic Control Units

Abstract

The vehicle testing–validation phase is a crucial and demanding task in the automotive development process for vehicle manufacturers. It ensures the correct operation, safety, and efficiency of the vehicle. To meet this demand, some commercial solutions are available on the market, but they are usually expensive, have few connectivity options, and are PC-dependent. This paper presents an IoT-based intelligent low-cost system for vehicle data acquisition during on-road tests as an alternative solution. The system integrates low-cost acquisition hardware with an IoT server, collecting and transmitting data in near real-time, while artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms process the information and report errors and/or failures to the manufacturing engineers. The proposed solution was compared with other commercial systems in terms of features, performance, and cost. The results indicate that the proposed system delivers similar performance in terms of the data acquisition rate, but at a lower cost (up to 13 times cheaper) and with more advanced features, such as near real-time intelligent data processing and reduced time to find and correct errors or failures in the vehicle.

Keywords

• acquisition system
• electronic control unit (ECU)
• vehicle testing
• hardware
• controller area network (CAN)