A Canopen-Based Gateway and Energy Monitoring System for Electric Bicycles

• Main Authors: Van-Tung Bui, Chyi-Ren Dow, Yu-Chi Huang, Pei Liu, Vu Duc Thai
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-07-01
• Series: Energies
• Subjects: CAN bus; CANopen; EnergyBus; e-bike; gateway; energy monitoring
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/15/3766

The limitation of battery capacity is a cause of range anxiety that reduces the wide use of electric bicycles (e-bikes). Therefore, many works have developed systems that provide assistance to cyclists to deal with the range anxiety problem. However, these systems may have limited applications since they can only work with the e-bike manufacturers’ hardware and communication protocols. This paper proposes an energy monitoring system (EMS) for e-bikes, which is based on EnergyBus, a standardized hardware and communication protocol for e-bikes. EnergyBus standard is based on controller area network (CAN) bus and CANopen protocols. EMS comprises a gateway connected to EnergyBus of e-bike and an EMS application installed on a smart device that connects to the gateway via Bluetooth. The gateway provides CAN bus monitoring and CANopen device data access services to the smart device. These services are modeled to determine gateway parameters to ensure the efficient performance of the gateway and to keep the working status of the monitored e-bike safe. The EMS application provides the cyclist information about battery status, rider efforts, and other related information such as distance and speed. Experimental results show that the proposed gateway can monitor data in real-time and ensure monitored system safety.