Happy New Year 2026 to everyone! I accientally used NMEA2000 standard on M12-5 pinout, so I am adapting my power connector to be a M12-5 with Power and CAN. NMEA2000 has a Power/CAN pinout as standard that I want to adapt to my ECU designs with the difference that I allow 8-36V rather than only…
I love the M12 connectors, but they are expensive and dealing with CAN or RS485 I often find myself in need of screw terminals or D-SUB 9 rather than point to point expensice M12 connectors and cables. One example is the module below which is a RS485 with M12-5. It is great for what it…
Part 1 of this article summarized scope of work because software for an ECU basically have two core bulks – one is the core and main controller, while the second is the add-one modules and specialized IO. This second part is basically endless as we will be adding more features and more hardware, so in…
I have started the FW on the ECU that will take a while, but I can outline the main design principles I use: ECU Hardware consist of a a motherboard with a M12-4 Power connector. I use the same format as NMEA2000, but allow for 8V to 30ichV PSU rather than only 12V. I do…
I added a 5KV Isolated RS485 capable of 8Mbps++ baudrate. The design follows the new CAN module with an optional USB at left.
I was focused on making a CAN Modul, but as I tested yesterday I also realized that I easely can add a USB port on this to use it as a stand-alone USB/CAN Adapter – which is very handy since it has the M12-5 connector used by NMEA2000. This modul has been straight up so…
Finished CAN Modul. This uses a M12-5 Male because the NMEA2000 T-Connectors are female and most cables are female to male, so this can be connected directly on a NMEA2000 network with no extra fuzz. One of the nice details are the 5V DC/DC on right bottom, a SSR to switch on/off 120Ohm resistor and…
This is a Dual Ethernet Module using M12-4 ports. I drafted this earlier. I need to use aSTM32H573 for this since the PHY chip is a 3 x Ethernet switch. The big point with this module is that it provides dual, redundant ethernets, Profinet and Ethercat capabilities. I have Ethernet on the CAN Hub that…
It is alway cool to solder up a modul, plug it in and see that it is working – ok half a modul. Had to use the old CAN Hub as I have not soldered up any of the new main boards yet. I urgently need the NMEA2000 interface as a friend have problems in…
Following up on my previous entry – I think the new header on sub-diagrams worked out well. Colors/background can be changed in preferences, but the symbol is very different from function call and it is square to make it easy to attach lines. I could have used the more classic UML Package, but that header…