Overview
A distributed sensor node network for high-precision vehicle telemetry and data acquisition. The system uses a corner-node architecture built on a chip-down ESP32-S3FH4R2 design on a 4-layer PCB stackup. Each node captures mixed-signal sensor inputs and broadcasts formatted data onto a CAN bus network.
Hardware architecture
- Main controller — ESP32-S3FH4R2 chip-down with integrated flash/PSRAM.
- High-precision analog — ADS1220 24-bit delta-sigma ADC with integrated PGA for strain-gauge bridges and PT100 RTD interfacing.
- General analog — MCP3204 12-bit 4-channel SPI ADC for auxiliary dynamic input channels.
- Bus interface — TJA1051T-3 high-speed CAN transceiver on the ESP32’s CAN controller.
- Power & thermal — MCP1727 LDO for the 3.3 V rail, with onboard thermal monitoring via a TMP117 precision temperature sensor.
- Configurable interfaces — hardware jumpers reroute the inputs depending on the sensor package installed: tire-temperature arrays, Hall-effect current sensors, wheel-speed inputs, or strain-gauge bridges.
Firmware & software
- DBC-first communications — network message structures are defined in a
central CAN database (
.dbc) file. - Automated code generation — C communication structs and encode/decode
wrappers are generated from the DBC with
cantools. - ID allocation scheme — CAN IDs are organized into reserved 32-ID block allocations per subsystem node for predictable arbitration and parsing.