Sharpedge Engineering Limited Client Portfolio:
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About TSL Technology
TSL Technology provides market-leading electromechanical, instrumentation and micro-hydraulics equipment, power electronics and motors for the energy and marine industries. |
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| Project Information
We were initially involved with TSL Technology from January 2003 and have been engaged to design embedded software for a number of projects. Submersible System We developed software to control the power supply and manage the internal CAN bus communications network of a submersible vessel. The distributed software allowed thrusters and other equipment on board the vehicle to be controlled from a surface ship and also allowed private communication between the various on-board controllers. The architecture allowed the on-board thrusters to be connected to independent CAN busses, situated in separate water-tight compartments. This distributed design ensured the manoeuvrability of the underwater craft, even with partial flooding of the interior. A Hitachi H8S-2623 gateway processor in the vessel communicated with a peer controller in the surface ship. It functioned as a command router to other on-board modules and also carried an application that controlled the overall power system. The modules provided power supplies for the thrusters and other subsystems, and routed CAN bus messages to individual thrusters and ancillary devices. The message delivery scheme was designed to ensure the integrity of CAN messages and replies as they were distributed around the system. The communications protocol developed for this project employed a hierarchical addressing scheme embedded within the CAN message identifier, which determined the source and destination of each message. The addressing information in each message received from the surface was interpreted by the gateway, which either processed it locally or forwarded it to the specified module. The module, in turn, would either process the message itself or forward it to the specified thruster. The register-based CAN bus architecture allowed parameters to be controlled and monitored within the components of the distributed application, giving overall system control to the ship-based operator and supervisory control to the internal software applications. |