2019 International Conference on Computation, Communication and Engineering

Design and Implementation of SAE J1939 Vehicle Diagnostics System

B.V.P. Prasad, Jing-Jou Tang, Sheng-Jhu Luo

Department of Electronic Engineering, Southern Taiwan University of Science and Technology,

71005 Nantai Street, Yongkang District, Tainan City, Taiwan.
bvpprasad@stust.edu.tw, tjj@stust.edu.tw, 4a037025@stust.edu.tw,

Abstract J1939. In order to provide a reliable system, simulator such as

Driving safety is always the top priority of fleet management
for light duty (LD) vehicles. Unfortunately, the current bus
driving recorder cannot be manipulated electronically. That is,
the data plotted on the traditional pie chart is not digital and
cannot be used for vehicle accident verdict. In this paper, a
vehicle diagnostics system is developed based on the SAE
J1939 protocol, which is developed by the Society of
Automotive Engineers (SAE), for HD vehicles. In this system,
an integrated software and hardware interfaces are
implemented to monitor the vehicles relevant data. The Vector
CANoe simulator is utilized to simulate the proposed Electrical
Control Unit (ECU) in an automotive CAN bus environment.
In this work, RL78 MCU from Renesas Electronics of Japan is
used to design a monitoring device that supports SAE.
With the proposed system J1939 Bridge, the driver data
from the vehicle CAN bus can be monitored, analyzed and
calculated. It can yield a range of insights about drivers’
behaviour. The accessed data can also be displayed on a
specific LCD screen connected to the system. Besides, data can
be transmitted to other devices for mobile application via
Bluetooth connection. The J1939 Bridge, presented in this
paper, is jointly developed by STUST University and SwiSys
Company in Taiwan.
Key words: SAE J1939, CAN Bus, Vector CANoe, On-Board
Diagnosis - II, Emulator, Bluetooth Module.
I. INTRODUCTION
People pay more attention to driving safety, and the safety
requirements of drivers, passengers and transport operators are
increasing. The current driving recorder (commonly known as
the big pie chart) for heavy duty (HD) vehicles can only record
some brief information about the vehicle in a non-digital way.
Acquiring and analyzing data such as time, running mileage,
or RPM etc. are still impossible for HD vehicles in an
electronic and digital way.
In this paper, we aim to develop an electronic driver
behavior recorder based on the SAE (Society of Automotive
Engineers) J1939 standard for HD vehicles. The SAE J1939
standard can help the drivers of large vehicles, fleet managers
Vector CANoe is utilized. Different CAN Bus Emulators and
scopes are also used to verify the functionality of the system.
Based on the proposed system, most of the ECUs connected to
the CAN bus can be queried, and its current data can be
reported for diagnosis. Further analysis can be conducted based
on correlated data to provide more evidence in case of traffic
accidents.
II. BACKGROUND
A. CAN
CAN (Controller Area Network) standard is a
communication protocol developed by BOSCH and published
in 1986. It was listed in the ISO (International Organization for
Standardization) standard in 1993: ISO11898.
CAN is mainly used on the data bus of vehicle
communication network. It allows broadcast communication
between nodes, and provides a high fault-tolerant and debug
mechanism. In addition to automotive CAN applications they
are also used in industrial or other multi-node applications with
a high degree of stability communications environment.
CAN’s physical layer consists of a two-wire differential bus,
i.e., CAN_H and CAN_L, terminated at both ends by a 120-
ohm resistor and connected to a transceiver at each node. Logic
0 and Logic 1 data are defined as dominant bit and recessive
bit, respectively [1].
SAE J1939 / OSI Layers
Application SAE J1939/71
SAE J1939/73
Presentation
Session
Transport SAE J1939/21
SAE J1939/01
SAE J1939/81
Network SAE J1939/31
Data Link SAE J1939/21

(transportation companies), and traffic authorities perform

real-time digital control and analysis of data related to large SAE J1939/11
vehicles. Physical
SAE J1939/12
SAE J1939/14
SAE J1939 protocol completely determines the SAE J1939/15
communication rules from the physical layer to the application
layer and other layers. The Physical Layer and Data Link Layer Figure 1: SAE J1939 in the reference model for ISO/OSI.
are designed based on the protocol standard (ISO 11898) of the
B. SAE J1939
Control Area Control (CAN).
The protocol SAE J1939 defined by the international
In this paper, a specific hardware and software (firmware)
Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), which is mainly used
module is developed and tested to meet the standard of SAE

ISBN: 978-1-7281-3112-2 71
 2019 International Conference on Computation, Communication and Engineering
in the range of heavy commercial vehicles, both "On-Road"
(Truck & Trailer) and "Off-Road" (Construction, Cranes, etc.).
SAE J1939 is the recommended practice used for
communication and diagnostics interaction among heavy duty
(HD) vehicle components.
As illustrated in Figure 1, it defines five layers in the seven-
layer OSI network model, and this includes the CAN ISO
11898 specification (using only the 29-bit "extended" identifier)
for the physical and data-link layers. Under J1939/11, the data
rate is specified as 250 Kbit/s. SAE J1939/21 defines a special
parameter group (PG) called Request (RQST, PGN = 0x0EA00)
PG which may be used to request transmission of any other
parameter group. The session and presentation layers are not
part of the specification [2].
C. J1939 packet architecture and message analysis
SAE J1939 is a set of standards based on CAN (ISO 11898)
architecture, so the J1939 packet architecture is like CAN Bus,
it uses CAN 2.0B which is an extension CAN Bus. CAN 2.0B,
has a 29-bit data length for storage on the CAN packet
identification code (CAN
( ID)) as shown in Figure
g 2.
Figure 2: CAN 2.0B Extended Packet Format.
J1939's 29-bit ID contains the seven parts named as Priority,
R, DP, PDU Format, PF, PDU Specific and Source Address.
The PDU Format, PF, and PDU Specific are used to indicate
the PGN group of J1939 is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: SAE J1939 Packet format.
There are four categories in J1939's message delivery method,
namely:
x Data Frame: This is to send data to other ECUs.
x Request Frame: This is to request data from other ECUs.
x Error Frame: This is to indicate that an error occurred while
receiving data.
x Overload Frame: This is to indicate that an overload occurs
when receiving data.
III. LITERATURE SURVEY
Our research is aimed at analyzing the appropriate heavy-
duty vehicles based on J1939. Wang Quanqi et al [3], also
introduced a system for data acquisition and fault diagnosis for
vehicles. The main components of this system include a CAN
Transceiver, ARM Coretex M3 CPU, GPRS, LCD display, and
SD card. It only aims on the CAN bus On-Board-Diagnosis
(OBDII) for light-duty (LD) vehicles instead of the SAE J1939.
In [4], Pal-Stefan Murvay et al. focus on the security threats
to CAN bus in commercial HD vehicles. Their results show
72 ISBN: 978-1-7281-3112-2
that the introduction of the proposed security mechanism does
not have considerable effects on the generic CAN bus
communication reliability. They also show that CAN-FD,
standard proves to be an excellent solution for carrying the
additional authentication data. However, the emerging CAN-
FD, standard is not widely used in commercial vehicles.
Yang Jiansen et al. [5] proposed the Automobile Smart and
Integrated Control System (ASICS) framework for HD
vehicles with its proprietary XMQ J1939 protocol. In order to
reduce the design complexity, this paper only implements the
partial Diagnosis Message (DM) modes and the data length of
the data field is bound to 8.
Sun Wei et al [6] implemented a fault monitoring and
diagnosis system based on SAE J1939 protocol. The main
expert system is to develop a knowledge based and an event
triggered algorithm to build a reasoning mechanism-based
algorithm. This system relies on an embedded system with
ARMSYS2440 core processor and WINCE operating system.
Thus, the size and power consumption of the system is too
large to be equipped in a commercial vehicle.
The purpose of this work is to develop a hardware device
that meets the SAE J1939 on-board diagnostic system standard
for users and fleet managers. Our system helps the driver to
grasp the vehicle information at any time. With the advantages
of compact size and flexible interface, specific applications for
data storage, fusion, interpretation, and analysis, can be
realized easily.
IV. DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION OF SOFTWARE
AND HARDWARE SYSTEMS
A. System structure
The vehicle monitoring device "J1939 Bridge" developed in
this work on heavy duty vehicles is shown in Figure 4. "J1939
Bridge" can receive information from the vehicle, such as the
speed, engine speed, engine coolant temperature, including
other vehicle status, and transmit data via wireless
communication (Bluetooth) to the mobile application.
In real-time display, the mobile phone APP can also record
a message each time a vehicle sends a message and also can be
monitored on an LCD screen. The data is stored machine or
stored in the cloud for the back-end analysts were driving
behavior analysis. Based on SAE J1939 standard, heavy-duty
vehicles can transmit vehicle ECU information through the
J1939 protocol in a broadcast manner.
Figure 4: Heavy Vehicle using J1939 Bridge.
As demonstrated in Figure 5, this "J1939 Bridge" contains
four parts. They are:
x CAN Transceiver (TJA 1050)
x Main Controller (RL78 MCU)
x Bluetooth Transmission Module (HC-05)
x LCD.
 2019 International Conference on Computation, Communication and Engineering

B. Development Environment
The system development flowchart is shown in Figure 8.
Basically, the CANoe is used for system planning. The system
implementation (coding and debugging) is realized in the
Renesas RL78 design environment. Finally, the function
validation and verification is completed by using various J1939
emulators and specific scopes and logic
g analyzers for CAN bus.
Figure 5: Components in J1939 Bridge (solid lines).

The external oscilloscope is used to monitor the waveforms

of CAN_H or CAN_L between Emulator and CAN transceiver.
The CAN transceiver will normally receive raw CAN bus
information and sent to the RL78 CAN controller to interpret
the J1939 data format information and display it on the 20x4
LCD screen.
In this work we developed an adapter cable for "J1939
Bridge" to have J1962 SAE interface. SAE J1939 to SAE
J1962 connector adapter cable is shown in Figure 6. Its pin Figure 8: Development process Layout.
position is shown in Figure 7 and described in Table 1. The
J1939 protocol used in this work is a communication protocol Vector CANoe and Renesas RS+ development environments
based on the CAN protocol, and this work will obtain the CAN are being used to verify the system architecture and software
Bus signal through Pin 6 (CAN Low) and Pin 14 (CAN High) stack to realize the suggested "J1939 Bridge". We will give an
pins of SAE J1962 and translate it based on SAE J1939 overview of these tools.
protocols.
I. Vector CANoe
Vector CANoe is a vehicle electronic control unit
development system developed by the German Vector
company, a comprehensive software tool for developing,
testing and analyzing individual ECUs (Electronic Control
Units) and the entire ECU network [7]. It supports the entire
Figure 6: OBD Adapter Cable SAE J1939 to SAE J1962 [4] development process for network designers and test engineers
. from planning to system as shown in Figure 9.
P1 J1939F A Ground 4+5 P2 J1962F
B +12V 16
Eġ Dġ C CAN + 6
Cġ D CAN - 14
Fġ Aġ Bġ
F J1708 + 13
Jġ G J1708 - 12
Gġ H CAN 2 + 3
Hġ
J CAN - 11
Figure 7: SAE J1939 to SAE J1962 connector adapter cable pin map.

Figure 6 illustrates an adapter cable for SAE J1939 connector

to SAE J1962 connector. There are 9 signal pins in J1939
connector adapter which are respectively A, B, C, D, E, F, G,
H and J. In addition, there is an E pin which is the empty pin.
As for the J1962 connector port, 9 signal pins, namely
3,4,5,6,11,12,13,14 and 16 are utilized.
Figure 7 depicts the pin mapping between these two ports.
Actually, for the J1962 standard used in the OBDII protocols,
pins 8, 9, 11, 12, 13 are for left vehicle manufacture discretion.
Table 1: SAE J1939 to SAE J1962 Pin Comparison Chart.
SAE J1939 Description SAE J1962
A GND 4,5
B Power+ 16
C CAN-High 6 Renesas RL78/F14 MCU. An RPB (Renesas Promotion Board)
D CAN-Low 14
F Make/Model Specific 13
G Make/Model Specific 12
H Make/Model Specific 3
J Make/Model Specific 11
Figure 9: Development process in Vector CANoe [7].
The CANoe project development process is divided into
three Phases as shown in Figure 9.
x Phase 1: Performs all virtual ECU deployments in
CANoe.
x Phase 2: Partially virtualizes some virtual ECUs
and connect them to virtually ECUs in CANoe.
x Phase 3: Entities all ECUs and uses CANoe for
verification.
II. Renesas CS+
In this work, the "J1939 Bridge" is developed based on the
comprised of an integrated CAN Bus, LIN Bus, UART Port,
HMI and I/O Port is used for development and testing, as
shown in Figure 10.

ISBN: 978-1-7281-3112-2 73
 2019 International Conference on Computation, Communication and Engineering
4x20 LCD
Bluetooth Module
I/O
UART
Figure 10: Renesas RL78 RPB Development System.
The RL78F14 consists of a single chip 16-bit
microcontroller. Data read from its CAN Tx / Rx interface will
be interpreted and sent to the Bluetooth module via the SAU0-
UART0 Tx / Rx interface. Thus an App. on the external mobile
phones can access the J1939 data through the Bluetooth
communication channel.
V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULT
Regarding the Functional Verification (FV), two J1939
emulators OBD_SIM10 and J1939_ECU_Simulator are used
to evaluate the functionality and compatibility of our
development system. The J1939 emulator is a kind of a
hardware that enables to imitate the diagnosis, interaction
between HD vehicle and external scan tools. The analyzed
basic signals include the speed of the vehicle, RPM,
temperature and coolant temperature. Figure 11 depicts the
first experiment for FV-1 using oscilloscope and a CAN Bus
hub. This CAN Bus hub acts not only a signal hub for CAN
nodes, but also a physical power supply to all the components.
The oscilloscope shows the monitored waveform of CAN_H
signal and the decoded CAN message frame. From the decoded
message frame, we can find that the CAN ID 18FE6CEEh we
interpreted
p from our "J1939 Bridge"
g is correct.
Figure 11: FV-1 – By Emulator-A (OBD_SIM10).
The OBD_SIM10 Vehicle Signal Simulator connection and
assembly is shown in Figure 11, it is used for analyses whether
J1939 Bridge can successfully interpret the message generated
by the OBD_SIM10 vehicle signal simulator. After analyzing
the signal of the simulator by ZLG USB-CANII signal analysis
device, the simulator provides information such as vehicle
speed, engine speed, engine coolant temperature, etc., After
testing and comparison, it is observed that "J1939 Bridge" can
successfully interpret the vehicle speed, engine speed, engine
coolant temperature and other information and display it on the
LCD screen.
The J1939_ECU_Simulator is used for FV-2 as shown in
Figure 12. From the interactive verification and testing on CAN
message frames, it is evident that our "J1939 Bridge" can
successfully interpret the vehicle information such as RPM,
VSS, ECT, SPN, FMI, OC, EOT, TP, BPV and MAP. Besides,
all this information can be displayed on the LCD screen in a
manner of switching every five seconds.
74 ISBN: 978-1-7281-3112-2
Figure 12: FV-2 – By Emulator-B (J1939_ECU_Simulator).
The development board uses an oscilloscope for waveform
observation. The oscilloscope is used to verify that the CAN
Bus can reliably transmit data and observe the integrity of the
waveform, it helps to confirm that the "1939 Bridge"
developed in this paper is safe and reliable in all kinds of noise
environments.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper the authors have proposed a "J1939 Bridge"
based on the SAE J1939 communication standard for HD
vehicles. From the experimental results, we have shown that
internal sensor data from HD vehicles connected to the "J1939
Bridge" can be successfully accessed. The data such as engine
speed, travel speed, engine coolant temperature, diagnostic
error code, engine oil temperature, torque value, intake
manifold pressure value, etc., can be displayed on an LCD
display or a mobile App. via Bluetooth communication.
Furthermore, the real time data storage can be implemented on
the cloud through the communication channel (i.e., 4G or 5G)
for driver behavior analysis. Eventually, the concept of UBI
(Usage Based Insurance) for drivers can be realized based on
the record of driver behavior.
VII. REFERENCES
[1] CAN Bus Introduction., Renesas Electronics Taiwan, 2017.
[2] Understanding SAE J1939 by Simma Software, Inc.
http://www.simmasoftware.com/j1939-presentation.pdf
[3] W. Quanqi, W. Jian, and W. Yanyan, "Design of Vehicle Bus
Data Acquisition and Fault Diagnosis System," in Proc. IEEE
International Conference on Consumer Electronics,
Communications and Networks, (CECNet), XianNing, China, pp.
245-248, Apr. 2011.
[4] P. S. Murvay and B. Groza, "Security shortcomings and
countermeasures for the SAE J1939 commercial vehicle bus
protocol," in Proc. IEEE Transcations on Vehicular technology,
Vol. 67, no. 5, pp. 4325-4339, Jan. 2018.
[5] Y. Jiansen, G. Konghui, D. Haitao, Z. Jianwel and X. Bin, "The
application of SAE J1939 protocol in Automobile Smart and
Integrated Control System" in Proc. IEEE International
Conference on Computer, Mechatronics, Control and Electronic
Engineering, (CMCE), Changchun, China, pp. 412-415, Aug.
2010.
[6] Wei Sun., Jun Li., Ying Gao., Dawei Qu & Chenghong Yang.
The Design of Embedded Bus monitoring And Fault Diagnosis
System Based on Protocol SAE J1939. In 2010 Asia-Pacific
Power and Energy Engineering Conference, IEEE, 2010; 1-4.
[7] Vector CANoe User Manual, Informatik, 2010.
https://www.vector.com/int/en/products