Analyzing EV CAN Bus Data in Custom Grafana Dashboards
Case Studies / Hochschule Fulda
Hochschule Fulda
Fulda University of Applied Sciences is the first German University of Applied Sciences to have been conferred the right to award PhD degrees.
What problem did you solve?
We needed to log CAN bus data from an electric bus (Sileo S18), as well as from auxiliary sensor modules (GNSS/IMU). Specifically, the purpose of our data analysis is to help identify the impact of 'driving style' on the energy consumption of the bus - and on which routes the electric bus can best replace an existing diesel bus.
How did you solve it?
We deployed the CANedge2 in the bus together with a RUT240 cellular router (as the WiFi access point), providing a stable setup. With this, we log CAN data from the main ECU of the electric bus - and the drive inverter of the powertrain. To get additional data on the vehicle dynamics we added the CANmod.gps to get the vehicle GPS position and acceleration rates. For the evaluation of electric energy flows, additional current sensors with CAN interfaces were also installed. The CANedge2 is connected via WiFi to the cellular router, uploading data to our self hosted MinIO S3 server running on NAS (Synology).
On our server, the raw CAN data is decoded using the CANedge Python API and the plug & play 'InfluxDB Writer' dashboard integration script. The script writes the decoded data to our self-hosted InfluxDB time series database. Finally the data is visualized via panels on our self hosted Grafana dashboard platform.
"The CANedge2 and CANmod.gps work well and have helped provide interesting EV insights"
What benefit has this led to?
The CANedge2 helped provide interesting insights into the energy streams in an electric vehicle as well as data to evaluate the overall efficiency of electric mobility.
Why did you choose the CANedge2?
We had previously ued the CL2000 CAN logger/interface with success. Further, the CANmod is a useful addition to CANedge2 because of the great amount of GNSS/IMU based signals it produces.
— Mathias Herget, Hochschule Fulda
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