Desenvolvimento de driver e interface em sistema operacional Linux para controle de sensores e atuadores em automóveis

Abstract

The newest generation of automotive vehicles, including autonomous vehicles, is evermore connected to its components and even to other vehicles as well through the Internet of Things, which expands well beyond the current scenario of entertainment applications offered by companies in the market today. Having that in mind, this paper contemplates the development of a device driver and a communication API in the Debian distribution of the Linux operational system, driver which will be developed using C language through a remote debugger that uses the libraries already present in that operational system, which is adopted by the BeagleBone Black platform, used as the main device of the network. The driver's objective is to control a wireless network of vehicular sensors and actuators in a modular way, following the CAN network device identifiers used in automobiles, using the transceiver MRF24J40MA to communicate between these devices, as this transceiver adopts the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. In order to allow communication between high level programs and the driver, an API was created to be invoked by system call in a way that it will communicate with the main driver through local sockets and threads, allowing it to have a multiclient channel to attend multiple system calls, through which information can be solicitated regarding specific sensors or action commands can be delivered to actuators. For the development of both the driver and API, a remote debugger will be configured between a general-purpose computer (PC) and the Debian platform in order to utilize the libraries contained in it and facilitate the development when using a graphical interface, in this case, NetBeans. The main driver will contain both SPI and Transceiver drivers, as well as the Module Controller together with the sensors and actuators sub-drivers. With the main device completed, it a necessity to have another microcontroller to establish the wireless communication and emulate a sensor or actuator in the network, and for that purpose the FRDM KL25Z platform from NXP was chosen. One of the acquired results was the successful remote debugging of the driver, which allowed for a successful demonstration of the module imports and the SPI and Transceiver drivers configurations. The result of the API system call can also be visualized and confirmed, and through these facts it can be concluded that this paper brings a contribution to the automotive platforms that opt for using wireless sensors and actuators, with the idea of making these vehicles more affordable. This paper also brings contribution to remote debugging and modularization of C language libraries. As a contribution to all the development community, the resulting code of this paper is available as an open source project in GitHub, as described in the conclusion of the paper.