Customer:
An Italy based Tier-1 supplier, of weighing, batching and complex control systems.
Due to persistent R&D and top quality products, our customer has evolved as a trusted supplier of automation instruments to Industrial and Agriculture domains.
Business Challenge:
- As a trusted supplier of agriculture automation products, our customer had decided to migrate to a suite of products compliant with ISO 11783 industry standard.
- Since our customer lacked in-house expertise and skill-sets to migrate to ISO 11783 complaint ISOBUS software, they were on a look-out for an embedded software development partner.
- Outsourcing of ISOBUS software development and integration was also preferred to help in-house R&D team to focus on core activities of product development.
Partnering with Embitel for ISOBUS stack integration:
- Our Automotive embedded software development team has designed a pre-tested, ISO 11783 standard complaint and reusable ISOBUS software stack solution.
- The customer has developed confidence on our platform independent ISOBUS solution which is designed as a layered architecture software stack.
- Customer also realized the value-add of our 10+ years of automotive domain expertise.
Embitel Solution:
- ISOBUS software solution designed by our embedded developers is a ready-to-deploy stack.
- Our automotive team integrated the ISOBUS protocol stack that is compatible with all 8-bit, 16-bit and 32 bit Microcontrollers. This ensured that ISOBUS solution is hardware platform agnostic
- Our software developers integrated the following ISOBUS stack layers :
- ISO11783-3 – Data link layer: To facilitate the data transmission among the different automotive control units over the CAN bus using various protocols such as BAM (Broadcast announce message, in case the data is greater than 8 byte).
- ISO11783-5 – Network management layer: This layer is developed to support the address claim feature of the device network components. It stores the device specifications (manufacturer details).
- ISO11783-7 – Implement Messages (Application Layer) : This layer of the ISOBUS software stacks enables the data communication of important parameters such as time, distance, navigation, ground speed etcetera.
- ISO11783-12- Diagnostic Services: Defined PGNs specified in the ISO 11783 standard are used for fault or failure diagnostic purposes.
- ISO11783-10- Task Controller: We have designed a dedicated task controller layer for controlling the tasks that the agriculture machinery is expected to perform.
- ISO11783-13- File server: The transfer of multimedia files (generally larger in size) are managed by the file server layer.
- ISO11783-6 – Virtual Terminal: This layer communicates with the User Interface (UI) designed to help control and manage various tasks.
- We developed a CAN driver API to support Hardware Abstraction of data communication via the physical layer (CAN Bus). This ensures that the ISOBUS stack solution is independent of the hardware platform.
- Hardware abstraction is significant as this allows customer to upgrade or replace hardware platform in future without replacing the software code
- Our pre-tested ISOBUS stack solution is compatible with both non-RTOS and RTOS systems.
Embitel Impact:
- Our pre-packed, pre-tested, reusable and ISO 11783 complaint ISOBUS solution met the quality expectations of our customer.
- Due to quality stack integration, support and maintenance services, our customer was able to migrate their suite of agriculture automation products to ISO 11783 complaint ISOBUS software.
- This helped our customer to reduce their time-to-market and cost involved in development.
Tools and Technologies:
- PC Lint was used for static analysis of embedded C code to ensure that the embedded software code was MISRA-C complaint.
- Hardware platform : Freescale Microcontroller HC12S (over which ISOBUS software stack was ported)
- Software IDE: code warrior
- Simulator : Vector simulator
- Automotive Protocols : CAN and ISOBUS
- Software Coding language : Embedded C
