Embedded Systems Academy

A few months back, EmSA’s CANopen and CANopen FD libraries and protocol stacks were integrated into NXP’s MCUXpresso SDK supporting multiple NXP microcontroller families, inlcuding the LPC54xxx family. That MCU family was chosen by PEAK Systemtechnik for a number of industrial input and output devices.

The newly released PCAN-MicroMod FD DR CANopen Digital 1 is the first of their industrial I/O device integrating both CANopen and CANopen FD within the same firmware. All essential settings of the DIN-Rail mountable device are made with turn dials: selection of CANopen or CANopen FD modes, bitrates and node id used.

Typical use cases include future proofing CANopen systems by already choosing CANopen FD capable devices and quickly adding generic I/O devices(s) to custom, embedded CANopen FD networks.

The device passed the official CiA CANopen conformance test. The CANopen FD test is pending.

For more information, see the PEAK product page.

February 24, 2020 – Embedded Systems Academy (EmSA) and NXP® Semiconductors announce the integration of the free-to-use EmSA Micro CANopen libraries into the NXP MCUXpresso Software Development Kit (SDK) for developing with NXP’s microcontrollers (MCU) and crossovers based on Arm® Cortex®-M.

For years, many MCUs have been equipped with the Controller Area Network (CAN) interfaces including CAN FD. These interfaces are optimized for embedded communication and make it easy to transmit and receive single messages.

“To take full advantage of the capabilities of such interfaces, middleware communication protocols are required,” says Olaf Pfeiffer, General Manager of EmSA. “One of the most
popular protocols for embedded CAN applications is CANopen, for which EmSA has delivered its Micro CANopen software for more than 20 years, and remains highly used among embedded developers.”

Free-to-use versions of EmSA’s Micro CANopen library are now fully integrated into the MCUXpresso SDK for a selection of NXP LPC MCUs and i.MX RT crossover MCUs.

“This integration further simplifies the process of prototyping and integrating sophisticated and reliable communication into embedded systems.” said Brendon Slade, director of MCU ecosystem for Edge Processing at NXP Semiconductors. “For most systems, the libraries can be used in production without further licensing.”

One of the first adopters is PEAK-System Technik: Their industrial I/O module PCAN-MicroMod FD is based on NXP’s LPC54000 MCU series and uses a variation o

f EmSA’s Micro CANopen libraries. “Using a proven CANopen (FD) protocol implementation for our I/O devices greatly reduced our development time and opens up additional use-cases for our customers.”, says Uwe Wilhelm, General Manager of PEAK-System Technik.

For more information about the NXP microcontrollers currently supported by EmSA’s free to use CANopen libraries and video tutorials, visit www.em-sa.com/nxp

About MCUXpresso SDK
Available in downloads based on user selections of MCU, evaluation board and optional software components, the MCUXpresso SDK merges customization and quality in a suite of production-grade runtime software. Complete with pre-integrated RTOS middleware, stacks and middleware, reference software, and MISRA-compliant drivers analyzed with Coverity® static analysis tools, it’s the ultimate software framework and reference solution for application development with NXP MCUs and crossover MCUs based on ARM® Cortex®-M cores.

About Embedded Systems Academy
Embedded Systems Academy (EmSA) is an NXP gold partner and has locations in Barsinghausen, Germany and San Jose, California. EmSA provides tools, training and services for planning, implementing, debugging, commissioning and testing of embedded networking technologies including CAN, CAN FD, CANopen, CANopen FD, CiA447, J1939 and others. EmSA’s tutors Olaf Pfeiffer, Christian Keydel and Andrew Ayre published two books about CAN, CANopen and security on CAN systems. They regularly publish related articles and papers for various international conferences.

Contact
Embedded Systems Academy GmbH
Olaf Pfeiffer
info@esacademy.de

Over the last years we published more than 50 articles, papers, books, webinars and we also continuously updated our training materials. However, some of the training material and especially scientific papers only reach a small percentage of the embedded community. Therefore we decided to publish more free educational videos to reach more of you. As a start we created several playlists on our EmSA Youtube channel. These include:

• CANopen FD Intro:
  Introductory videos to CANopen FD, also covering some basics like an introduction to the CANopen Object Dictionary concept
• CAN (FD) Security:
  Video collection about CAN and CAN FD security challenges and solutions
• MCUXpresso Middleware:
  Video collection about NXP’s MCUXpresso and CANopen libraries included

We plan to publish more videos in the upcoming month, further focusing on CAN, CAN FD, CANopen, CANopen FD topics including introductory videos as well as in-depth technology classes.

Please subscribe to the channel to stay informed about new videos published.

This year we present multiple papers at the upcoming Embedded World (25th to 27th of February in Nuremberg, Germany) and the international CAN Conference (17th to 18th March in Baden-Baden, Germany). Chris and I will be talking with our partners of NXP Semiconductors, PEAK

-Systemtechnik and the Hochschule Offenburg about CAN (FD) security and CANopen (FD) Smart Bridging. In our security papers, we examine how different existing and CAN capable security methods can best complement each other. With SmartBridgingFD we show how classical CANopen devices or networks can easily and transparently be mixed with newer CANopen FD installations. As classical CANopen and CANopen FD are not compatible on the bitrate level, they can not share the same CAN wiring. However, the SmartBridgeFD allows combining classical CANopen and new CANopen FD networks into one large logical network.

At the Embedded World, you can see the SmartBridgeFD integrated into the CANopen FD demonstrator at the CiA booth (hall 1 booth 630). Another of our CANopen (FD) demos will be displayed at NXP Semiconductors (hall 4A booth 220), as our CANopen software is now part of NXP’s latest SDK. Our CAN hardware partner PEAK Systemtechnik is in hall 1 (booth 483).

The Embedded World conference program is now online, we are in Session 2.1. The program for the international CAN Conference is here, our papers are in Session IV and VII.

Our authors Christian Keydel and Olaf Pfeiffer published an article in the current CAN newsletter, summarizing the current status of CAN security specifications.

Please follow the link above for more details.

Excerpt:

End of June 2019, the CiA association hold a phone conference for safety and security issues. Holger Zeltwanger gave the participants an update regarding “base documents”. When defining security solutions for Classical CAN, CAN FD, or CAN XL systems, it would be preferable to not start from scratch defining security basics for embedded systems or embedded communication systems. Unfortunately, the current draft of ISO 21434 “Road Vehicles – Cybersecurity engineering” does not seem to be suitable, as it is very generic and not yet completed. It is more of a guideline what designers and developers need to keep in mind when designing a “secured” vehicle.

Another document suggested is the “Baseline Security Recommendations for IoT” by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity. Until the next meeting, CiA will review and report, if that document is suitable to be referred to also by CiA documents. CAN XL is still in an early specification phase and the related special interest group, recognizing the possibility for security features in hardware to be part of future CAN XL controllers, therefore suggested adding security features to CAN XL first. One of the discussed options is a blacklist/whitelist scheme like the one implemented by the NXP secure CAN transceiver family. Such a scheme can eliminate several potential attack vectors at once if all participants in a CAN (XL) network actively support it. Once we see which security features made it into the CAN XL specification (and hardware), we can review if any of these can still be applied to CAN FD, too, for example on the transceiver level.

However, potential CAN controller specific hardware security features will most likely not be suitable to migrate back into CAN FD, so protocol based security solutions are still required.

Darmstadt and Hannover, June 12th, 2019. PEAK-System Technik GmbH (www.peak-system.com) and Embedded Systems Academy GmbH (www.esacademy.de) have deepened their partnership to provide common CANopen, CANopen FD, and J1939 solutions. For more than 15 years, Embedded Systems Academy GmbH (EmSA) has offered numerous CANopen software products including monitors, analyzers, simulators, configurators, and protocol stacks for the CAN (Controller Area Network) hardware of PEAK-System Technik GmbH (PEAK). Building on that partnership, PEAK has now become a shareholder and partner of EmSA.

“By formally joining the PEAK Group of companies, we can now more easily share resources and are better positioned to streamline development processes that involve both CAN hardware and software,” says Olaf Pfeiffer, General Manager of Embedded Systems Academy GmbH.
Current projects of PEAK and EmSA include CANopen (FD) generic input and output devices, CANopen (FD) protocol libraries, security options for CAN and diagnostics and test systems for CANopen (FD) and J1939.

“The deepened partnership with EmSA will provide our hardware customers with a variety of easy-to-use software products for CANopen, CANopen FD, and J1939 applications,” says Uwe Wilhelm, General Manager of PEAK-System Technik GmbH. “We’ll announce our new joint CANopen and CANopen FD solutions on our websites and blogs over the coming months.”

The CANgineBerry (www.cangineberry.com) is a smart coprocessor module for the Raspberry Pi®, other popular embedded microprocessor systems or a PC. It allows offloading CANopen tasks from the main system while communicating with it though a regular serial port which greatly simplifies application development. Firmware for different purposes can be programmed through the same interface. New releases for the CANopen Device and Manager application firmware are now further enhancing the functionality of the CANgineBerry.

The CANopenIA-BEDS (V1.5) firmware for CANopen devices now also supports the tunneling of plain-CAN messages for special cases where CANopen is not used or the network needs custom messages. It also adds CANcrypt to support secure and authenticated CANopen communication between up to 15 participants. Lastly, it now supports an advanced manual triggering for Transmit Process Data Objects (TPDOs) where the host application can decide when exactly to trigger the transmission of a TPDO in addition to the standard fully-automatic mode, .

The CANopenIA-MGR (V1.7) firmware implements a self-configuring CANopen controller/manager. It contiuously monitors the network for new CANopen nodes and scans their configuration in order to set up automatic PDO handling. Also here, the new version implements advanced manual triggering options for TPDOs. For example, when the application wants to write data to a remote CANopen node’s Object Dictionary (OD) entry, the default behavior is that the controller automatically decides which transport — PDO or Service Data Object (SDO) — to use, depending on whether that OD entry is part of a PDO or not. In some cases, more control is desirable, though, so now the application can disable the automatic handling and manually select SDO vs. PDO as well as manually trigger TPDO transmissions.

The latest CANgineBerry software and firmware is available here: [CANgineBerry.com]

The CANgineBerry is available here: [US] [UK] [EU] [DE]

With every start of a new year, those preparing for the Embedded World and its conference in Nuremburg get busy – so do we. This year our tutors and partners present several papers, mostly around CAN (FD), CANopen (FD) and security issues. Over the last year it became clear that in embedded communication there are a variety of attack vectors as illustrated in the figure right. For protection, security is required on multiple levels, preferably at every network layer.

Find some recommended classes below. The full program is available here.

Tuesday 26th, from Communication – CAN

09:30 – 10:00 / Troubleshooting in Embedded Networks Based on CANopen FD
Reiner Zitzmann, CAN in Automation

10:00 – 10:30 / Automated Node ID Assignment in CAN and CAN(FD) Networks
Christian Keydel & Olaf Pfeiffer, Embedded Systems Academy

10:30 – 11:00 / Signal Improvement Concept for CAN FD Networks
Yao Yao, CAN in Automation

Tuesday 26th, from HW-based Security

12:00 – 12:30 / Extend MCU Security Capabilities Beyond Trusted Execution with Hardware Crypto Acceleration and Asset Protection
Saurin Choksi, NXP Semiconductors

15:00 – 15:30 / Methods for Provisioning Security Features in a Cortex-M33 based MCU Using A Physically Unclonable Function
Rob Cosaro, NXP Semiconductors

Wednesday 27th, from Architectures & Hacking

16:30 – 17:00 / Securing all Network Layers of CAN (FD) Communication
Olaf Pfeiffer, Embedded Systems Academy
Andreas Walz, Offenburg Univeristy

Meet us at Embedded World

During the show, you will find our tutors either at the CiA booth (hall 1, booth 630) with the CANopen FD Demonstrator or at the NXP booth (hall 4A, booth 220) featuring a Multi-Layer CANopen FD Security Demonstrator.

At the upcoming CiA cyber security workshop (Nuremberg, May 2nd) our engineers participate with two presentations. We inform participants about the most common attack vectors used on CAN (FD) systems and some of the basic protection mechanisms already available today. In a second part we will outline CANcrypt based mechanisms and how they can easily be used to implement a generic security layer. This layer can be used in between the CAN Data Link Layer and the higher protocol layers like J1939 or CANopen.

The cyber security workshop is free for CiA members. To register, visit the CiA web pages.

The new CANgineBerry is an active CAN interface with a Cortex-M0 microcontroller and various firmware options. At launch, two options are available: One for a CANopen Controller / Manager and one for a configurable CANopen slave device.

The CANopen Controller scans the network for connected slave devices within less than 50 ms after power-up, sets up process data handling, starts the network and continues monitoring it. Once the host that CANgineBerry is connected to is up and running as well, it can immediately start using the CANopen network and access any device.

The second firmware option is implementing a CANopen slave device which is fully configurable with node ID and with an Object Dictionary that the user creates with the provided CANopen Architect software (evaluation version is sufficient for this use).

The CANgineBerry’s host can be a Raspberry Pi®, another embedded computing systems or even a PC. The communication to the host system uses a regular serial channel (TTL-UART), so no special driver is required as UART support is typically part of all operating systems. The communication between host and CANgineBerry and the API is designed to serve the application. For example, heartbeats are automatically monitored but the host is only informed about changes in the heartbeat status (like “activated” or “lost”) but not about every individual heartbeat message.

This architecture of CANgineBerry addresses the shortcomings of many “CAN shields” that are passive, have no own intelligence and require the host computer to handle all CAN communication message by message. In worst case, a CAN system can have more than ten thousand individual messages per second. Sometimes the real-time requirements are below 10 ms for some responses which is not realistically achievable with a Linux or Windows® based host and a passive approach.

Summary of firmware options currently available or under development:

• CANopen self-configuring Controller / Manager
• CANopen slave device (configurable via EDS, Electronic Data Sheet)
• Lawicel CAN-RS232 protocol
• CANcrypt (secure CAN communication) for the above versions
• CiA 447 – automotive add-on electronics
• J1939 gateway

For more information about the CANgineBerry, current firmware options and availability, visit www.CANgineBerry.com