Safety for your FlexRay network through simulation

Our cluster emulation software EB tresos Busmirror can be augmented with our FlexRay-to-FlexRay gateway add-on that offers an extended set of functionalities for testing and debugging. This gateway add-on is configured via two Fibex files that are loaded to EB tresos Busmirror. These Fibex files contain the configurations of two FlexRay networks. You can make OEM-specific adjustment, such as alive counter and complex error scenarios. The software then generates a suggestion for a routing list based on similarity of names, which you can also edit manually.

Use cases of the FlexRay-to-FlexRay gateway

FlexRay data manipulation

A frequent use case is the manipulation of ECU data, frame and signal content. The Flexray-to-Flexray gateway allows you to manipulate data on its way from the ECU to the bus system and the other way round, without having to access the ECU directly. This way, you can intersperse both simple errors as well as complex error scenarios at signal and frame level. That enables you to test the behaviour of both the ECU and the network as a whole.

Examples for simple errors are missing signal values and artificial time lags. Examples for complex calculations are the transformation of signals (comprising one or more signals), the sporadic absence of individual frames or signals following a defined algorithm or the miscalculation of check sums or alive-counters.

The error interspersion is calculated in real-time on the interface hardware EB 61×0 or EB 2100. It can be configured either statically or using a PC, via a data channel.

Gateway between two FlexRay clusters

If you find yourself confronted with two separate FlexRay clusters, the gateway handles the routing between the two network parts. Having two separate FlexRay clusters can be a result of a schedule change during development. You can configure a routing list which permits a systematic routing of data. The FlexRay-to-FlexRay gateway has been designed to handle even the most complex scenarios. For example, if a signal is transmitted more often in one schedule than in the other, the different alive-counters have to be calculated on both networks. A similar complexity arises if the two FlexRay networks posses dissimilar low-level parameters. You can test ECUs that are not ready for start-up because our interface hardware EB 61×0 features three FlexRay controllers. One of these controllers is used on the one side of the gateway the other two controllers are employed on the other side of the gateway. The EB 61×0 synchronizes the two networks during startup within a matter of seconds. One network serves as a timing master and the other as a timing slave which is synchronized with the timing of the master.

Gateway and FlexRay cluster emulation

Our Flexray-to-Flexray gateway also allows you to test an ECU in combination with another, incomplete, FlexRay cluster. The gateway not only synchronizes the data streams between the clusters but also emulates the missing ECUs with the cluster. Adding the manipulation of data, as described above, paves the way for a range of possible test and analysis use cases.