Wouldn’t it be nice if you could record all measurements defined in an A2L file in an ETAS INCA experiment, all the time, during every calibration drive? Including all events such as calibration page switches and calibration changes?

These questions become more pertinent as OEMs gradually reduce the number of vehicles available for calibration drives. Calibration engineers spend less time in the vehicle for their calibration activities, while still having to complete their work in time.  As a result, it becomes ever more important to record as much data as possible in the shorter time span that is available.

Capture everything, all the time?

What does it take to record “everything, all the time”, and make effective use of the resulting massive amounts of data? There are a number of options already available − some of them separate, some in combination:

1. Bigger pipes
2. Standard experiments
3. Big data analysis tools
4. Drive recorders

Let’s look at these options in a bit more detail:

1. To paraphrase Chief Brody in the movie Jaws: “We’re gonna need a bigger pipe.” Traditionally, the bandwidth of the instrumentation inside development controllers often limited the number of measurements and sample rates. More on ECU access technologies like XETK and FETK later.
2. The intent of a standard experiment is that all calibrators use it for a particular controller calibration project without the need for any changes. Thus, it must include all measurements that are relevant to the project and record them continuously. In addition, it can have experiment layers that are specifically set up for each individual calibration sub task. Obviously, this leads to large amounts of data being recorded by INCA all the time.
3. Data analysis and search tools will let calibrators find conditions and events in the large pool of data created by big pipes and standard experiments.
4. Drive recorders provide recorded data even when the vehicle is driven for non-calibration tasks.

Which tools do I need?

ETAS’ product portfolio contains tools for all four options mentioned above:

1. Over the last decade we saw bandwidth of instrumentation interfaces go up from 3Mbyte/s on the early XETKs, to 20Mbyte/s with the newer FETKs. Today, ETAS provides XETKs and FETKs for almost all major automotive microcontroller families. For more details, have a look at our blog post on the Evolution of ETKs.
2. INCA’s maximum sustainable data rate continues to improve, allowing the use of large standard experiments. For example, INCA 7.3 can sustain data rates for 50000+ measurements at 40Mbyte/s.
3. The ETAS Analytics Toolbox (EATB) provides search capabilities through large amounts of measurement files, finding the events that you’re interested in. On this topic, please see our recent EATB-related blog post.
4. The ETAS ES820 drive recorder can run very large standard experiments. without needing any human interaction. It can start recording automatically from key-on until key-off.

The ideal solution

I call the ideal solution described in the first paragraph “Measure All, All the Time.” As explained above, ETAS is making continuous progress towards it and we can get you started. Please contact us about how to maximize the amount of vehicle development data that you can capture … we’re happy to help!