Connecting to a sensor - CAN RADAR

Introduction

This article demonstrates how to connect a sensor to PolySync and visualize the data the from the sensor. For this tutorial the sensor will be a Delphi SRR short range RADAR. We will use PolySync SDF Configurator to define a node describing this sensors physical configuration and we'll then use PolySync Manager to start the node. Finally we'll visualize the data using PolySync Studio.

 

This tutorial assumes that you have already:

• Installed PolySync
• Learned how to replay logs visualize data
• Connected a USB sensor (optional)

There are four steps for configuring Delphi RADAR with PolySync:

• Identify the hardware ID and circuit ID of the CAN interface
• Create a sensor node and configure the node with the data from the previous step
• Use the dynamic driver to query the radar, to get the sensor ID
• Finish configuring the node with sensor ID

CAN Channel and Circuit ID

CAN interface hardware IDs and Circuit IDs exist independent of a CAN sensor, they are hardware identifiers on the host machine. Supported hardware includes Kvaser or Peak connected USB and/or PCIe cards. To understand how to obtain CAN circuit information read about how to Locate CAN Identifiers.

Once we have obtained the CAN hardware ID and circuit ID (required) we need to set up our sensor node in the Configurator with these parameters. The SDF Configurator can be started from the terminal:

$ polysync-sdf-configurator

CAN Device ID

Once the CAN interface circuit ID and hardware ID are properly configured for the node we need to obtain the sensor identifier. The PolySync dynamic driver is capable of querying the sensor using the '-g' flag.

When we invoke the dynamic driver we will use the node ID that our sensor node is defined with. We can find the node ID in the upper right corner of the node configuration within the SDF Configurator (above).

$ polysync-dynamic-driver -n 1 -g -o

 After we obtain the sensor identifier we update our node in the SDF Configurator.

 Now we can start PolySync Manager, which spawns all enabled nodes for this host:

$ polysync-manager -n

And then start PolySync Studio to visualize the sensor data!

$ polysync-studio