New tools

National Instruments has released the ECU Measurement and Calibration Toolkit - extending its LabVIEW, NI LabWindows/CVI, and Microsoft C/C++ development environments to support measurement and calibration applications for electronic control unit (ECU) design and validation.

The new ECU Toolkit delivers functions that ECU designers, testers and engineers can use to build their own customized ASAM measurement and calibration applications. The new toolkit provides access to variables using the names defined in ASAM (.A2L) files and also supports ECU flashing.

ECUs contain internal physical values that engineers can access only through CCP protocol. However, because the many CCP protocol tools on the market are expensive turn-key solutions that offer little customisation, ECU engineers often end up paying for functionality they do not need.

Using the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment and the new ECU Toolkit, engineers can create their own highly specified ECU measurement and calibration applications, replicate their test systems and integrate the new applications into existing ECU test applications for a fraction of the cost.

The ECU Toolkit also is suitable for calibrating control algorithms residing on ECUs during the ECU design phase. Using the toolkit’s high-level functions, engineers can read and write to specific values in the algorithms, including characteristics, memory ranges, variables and set points. Engineers can use the ECU Toolkit to configure several measurement channels into a single a list of channels they can read or write together.