C

curtis montgomery

I'm New Here
Has anyone had experience with MLG interfacing with MOTEC engine management software/hardware. I really want to use the Voyager system but really do not want to duplicate the sensorium. The MOTEC system uses J1939 auto protocols and so does the MLG system but there would appear to be a little/lot more too it. The local MLG distributor cannot help me, What do I need to make them talk to each other or at least make the MLG system listen?
Any advise would be good.
Curtis RV7 Turbo STI
 
A Controller Area Network (CAN) uses a two-wire bus, where messages are transmitted and received between controllers. In order for the MGL and the MoTec to communicate through the CAN they would need the software of each to be able to recognize the messages sent. The software developer defines the identifiers of the messages and there is no common protocol for naming them. So even when the MGL and MoTec are connected on the same CAN bus the messages will be available but the software of each will not be able interpret the messages. The MGL uses the RDAC to convert the engine sensors values to CAN messages. The MGL software was written exclusively to communicate and interpret engine information sent by the RDAC for engine monitoring.

The only way not to duplicate the sensors would be if they are linear and have the same output range. Then a splice in the wiring would allow it to be wired to both the MoTec and the RDAC. Although for aviation applications I would be very reluctant to try this.

I am working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicle system development using the J1939/CAN system so I actually have some experience. If you have any specific questions send me a message and I'll try to help.

Regards,

Steve
 
Thanks for the info Steve, It is about what I was expecting. So I will go with plan B' and use a small notepad built into the panel and connected to the Motec live output .
Thanks again.
Curtis
 
curtis montgomery said:
Has anyone had experience with MLG interfacing with MOTEC engine management software/hardware. I really want to use the Voyager system but really do not want to duplicate the sensorium. The MOTEC system uses J1939 auto protocols and so does the MLG system but there would appear to be a little/lot more too it. The local MLG distributor cannot help me, What do I need to make them talk to each other or at least make the MLG system listen?
Any advise would be good.
Curtis RV7 Turbo STI
Click to expand...

This has been done by our French representative (www.delta-omega.com) - like many of our partners Olivier is quite tech-savvy and did something for one of his customers some time ago.
Here is how this works:

Even though Odyssey/Voyager has a built in CAN interface (and on the Voyager it is labelled J1939) we have not used this interface yet on these instruments other than for our new CAN bus driven autopilot servos.

The solution lies in a small, inexpensive addition which is a module not much larger than a box of matches - this we refer to as the "uCAN" interface and allthough it is one of our many products , it is not currently a product listed on our website. This device was originally created to support the Rotorway helicopters and their fancy engine management systems.

It is a small unit that fits inbetween our RDAC interface on the EFIS and either a CAN bus or a RS232 bus. It's duty is to convert CAN or RS232 based engine data into our RDAC data stream format.
It has been used on various applications and some MGL user even used it as a bridge between a GRT EIS and his EFIS.

We can make a free development environment with a small sample application available. It is based on one the embedded Pascal development compilers. These are compilers that I designed a couple of years before I bought my first flying machine and these where at the time sold as shareware.
So, for those able to do some programming (you may still need to buy some tools to program the micro, it is a AVR from ATMEL) - but these tend to be free if you can make up a programming cable.

For the motec, contact Olivier on the above website, I'm sure he will be able to help you. If you want to hack your own, you can do that too - in that case contact me !

Rainier
CEO MGL Avionics
 
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