Design and Application on Electric Vehicle Real-time

Condition Monitoring System by Internet of Things

Technology
Zhiping Liu, Wei Tao , Lei Jiang and Cunle Zhu
Department of Logistics Engineering
Wuhan University of Technology
Wuhan, Hubei Province, China
whut_tw@hotmail.com

Abstract—To avoid the frequent electric vehicle theft and traffic position tracking in the remote monitoring and management of
accident problems, a kind of electric vehicles real-time condition electric vehicles. Besides, the experimental process and results
monitoring system based on Internet of things is introduced in are given.
this paper. The hardware system is built by the module
integrated with GSM communication module and GPS chip, the
ADXL345 three-axis digital acceleration sensor and the II. INTEGRATED DESIGN OF SYSTEM
PIC16F1823 single-chip microcomputer control unit. The The whole monitoring system is made up of the local
software system is composed of the terminal program, PC or cell devices and the remote servers. The servers are established on
phone terminal server program. At the end of the paper, the the platforms of computers and cell phones. They are used to
position, remote control and alarm tests are carried out. The monitor the real-time conditions, such as the voltage of battery,
experimental results show that this system which is stable, vibration alarm, shift alarm on the protected state and alarm of
reliable, efficient in communication has a certain reference value over speed, rollover, crashes on the unprotected state. Here are
for further research. two dominant functions:
Keywords-Internet of things technology; monitoring; 1) Guard function. When the owner is far away from the
integrated module; accident alarming vehicle, the electric vehicle is switched to the protected state
and its real-time condition could be monitored remotely. If the
vehicle is stolen, the owner can receive alarm message via
I. INTRODUCTION SMS and get the precise location of the vehicle via GPS
Coming with a better living standard, higher quality of positioning.
traveling is demanded. In many developing countries, electric
vehicles have been the priority for some groups to travel in the 2) Rescue function. When the electric vehicle is on, it is on
city, due to its speed, convenience and low price. With the unprotected state. If there are accidents during the normal
poor traffic condition and complicated society, the electric driving, the vehicle terminal could also alarm and inform the
vehicle accidents and burglaries occur frequently. The safety relatives of the owner in time via short messages.
of residents and their properties are serious threatened. Principles of this system: first of all, the terminals will
Currently, most advanced electric vehicle terminals have build and maintain connection with the server through GPRS,
adopted GPS technology on the guarding, with a single meanwhile, pinpoint the current location through GPS, get the
function and poor real-time monitoring performance. Even battery voltage through IIC and collect the acceleration value
some terminals located by the base station are restricted by through the acceleration sensor. Then, the vehicle real-time
their position, which means they can not be found if far from information will be sent to the PC or cell phone every 30
the base. seconds. Alarm will be triggered and warning message will be
sent through GPRS and SMS if there is any abnormal. What’s
The electric vehicle monitoring system is based on the more, vehicle parameters can be conveniently set up and
Internet of things technology.The real-time condition could be queried, such as low voltage cut-off through PC or cell phone.
supervised well by the satellite positioning, data acquisition At last, all the Data Message will be saved in the database
from the sensors, data transportation from GPRS and remote perfectly.
management of the PC or cell phone. It can be applied into the
market for its strong terminal functions, low prices, low energy
III. DESIGN OF THE HARDWARE
consumption, convenience on cell phone monitoring, short
message alarming and good real-time property. The hardware of the electric vehicle is mainly introduced
in this part, shown in Fig.1. It is made up of an integrated
In this paper, a novel monitoring system is proposed on module with combination of GSM communication module and
electric vehicle real-time condition, which terminal is GPS module, GPRS antenna, GPS antenna, microcomputer
integrated with GPS module, wireless communication module, control unit, three-axis acceleration sensor, SIM card, power
sensor module and single-chip microcomputer control unit. PC supply, terminal status indicator light and peripheral interfaces.
and mobiles are used to achieve the intelligent recognition and
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978-1-4799-3279-5 /14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE


 communication. This control unit has an operating voltage as
1.8-5.5V, with low power consumption. Utilizing the accurate
internal 32MHz oscillator module, the frequency ranges from
31KHz to 32MHz. Besides, Master Synchronous Serial Port
with SPI and IIC and Enhanced Universal
Synchronous/Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter are used in
this control unit. These peripheral properties make the external
debugging convenient and efficient.
External circuits of PIC16F1823 are shown in Fig.3.
RC4/TX-pin and RC5/RX-pin is connected with SIP12. By
SIP12, the input and the output could be provided with an
insolated power and an electromagnetic coupling isolation
amplifier output by an analog signal. Not only the design of
hardware is simplified, but also the space utilization of PCB is
Fig.1 Construction of the terminal hardware improved. The analog signal isolation also could be amplified
A. Integrated Module and transmitted well.
The GSM module and GPS chip positioner are primarily
integrated into this module of terminal system. The data
collected by GPS module could be acquired swiftly. Through
IIC, the data collected by three-axis accelerate sensor are able
to be read, as well as the interrupt data from Micro Control
Unit.Resources are effectively saved and the efficiency of the
device has been improved dramatically. Its external circuit is
shown in Fig.2.

Fig.3 External circuit of PIC16F1823)

C. Sensor
ADXL345 three-axis acceleration sensor is adopted in the
system. It is primarily used to monitor the real time
conditions,such as the abnormal vibration of an unprotected
electric vehicle and roll overs or crashes while driving.
ADXL345 is a three-axis acceleration sensor which has small
cubage, low power consumption and high resolution. The
measurement range reaches ± 16g, which means it can be
Fig.2 External circuit of integrated module detected that not only the static acceleration of inclined state,
The communication between GPRS or SMS platform are but also the dynamic acceleration produced by crash of high-
mainly achieved by GSM. In the GSM communication module, speed movement. Moreover, the change in the inclination of
JB4001 GPS and GPRS dual function module and some 1.0 degree is capable to be detected due to the 3.9mg/LSB
external circuits are primarily used. The number of external resolution.
circuit components are much reduced because the JB4001
module is a highly integrated 2.5G GSM/GPRS baseband chip. The connection between ADXL345 and IIC is shown in
Besides, the GSM 850/900/1800/1900 four frequencies could Fig.4. The address of IIC is 0x53 and the CS-pin should be
be supported at the same time. It is also easy to debug because pulled up to VDD I/O through a simple 2-wire connection, and
of the integration of ARM7, PMU and DSP in the chip. The ADD-pin must be connected to the VDD I/O or ground.
dimension of the chip is 9*9 mm, satisfying the integrated
properties. All of its GPIO are designed as input and output
with interrupt capability. Extra functions of controlling and
monitoring are also offered efficiently.
The navigation chip GSD4E-9316-TR from CSR is used in
the GPS module. This chip has low price and power
consumption as well as perfect positioning function.

B. Control Unit
PIC16F1823 single-chip is used in the control unit. Some
Fig.4 External circuit of ADXL345
behaviors are mainly taken in charge by the chip, such as the
restart and hibernation of integrated module, acquiring the
voltage of the power and instructing the peripheral serial


D. SIM Card The sending thread is used to acquire and identify the
Not only the SIM cards of China Mobile and China output information from management thread. The information
Unicom, but also the extended SIM card interfaces could be would be sent out through the assigned channel.
supported. It is also suitable for double network switching The management thread is used to manage all the threads,
applications. initialize all the inside parameters, process the information
coming from other threads, execute the related action and
IV. DESIGN OF THE SOFTWARE alarm.
The software design is mainly comprised of the electric The microcomputer control unit program is used to process
vehicle terminal software design and the remote monitoring the sample and alarm of ADC, the sample and report of GPIO,
software design. communication between IIC and integrated module, storage of
local parameters and transmission between external UART
A. The electric vehicle terminal Software Design data and GSM module. The flow chart of the program is
The device software is designed according to the modular shown in Fig.6.
concept. It is divided into two dominant parts as the module
program and the microcomputer control unit program.
The module program is supported by five threads as GPS,
GPRS, receiving, sending and management. By the application
of modular architecture, the program is made to run smooth,
easy to manage. The flow chart is shown in Fig.5.

Fig.6 MCU program flow chart

B. The Remote Monitoring Software

The monitoring software on remote PC or cell phone is
introduced in this part. The mode of Browser/Server structure
is used on the PC. It is exchanged with the database through
Web Server. By using TCP/IP protocol, the communication
Fig.5 Module program flow chart between the electric vehicle monitoring software and the
The GPS thread is aimed to process the GPS data sources. terminal. Once the real-time data of status and abnormal
Here are functions: alarms reported by the terminals can be acquired, the location
1) Analyze the input data and fill them into a standard GPS of the terminals and the time of the events could be confirmed.
data structure for the call of other applications. Meanwhile, directions to control the electric vehicle can be
sent remotely. Monitoring is more effective and convenient,
2) Utilize the latest GPS data, debug the alarm of shifting with the developed application at the cell phone platform.
and speeding .
The GPRS thread is mainly in charge of the establishment V. TESTS AND RESULTS
and release of both GPRS and Socket, sending and receiving The test of this system is primarily composed of the
of the data, encapsulation functions of data, sending queue position, remote control and alarm test. According to the
analysis functions and process of exceptions. analysis of the results, the deviation of position, the accuracy
The receiving thread is used to transmit the data from of both remote control and alarm are figured out.
GPRS, SMS, UART, IIC, preset it into defined format and put
it into the queue. The upper queue would be notified of new A. Position Test
data then. By using the remote server, the device is located accurately.
As shown in Fig.7, the deviation is less than 50m.


 The acceleration change will be small in the vertical
direction during electric vehicle’s normal driving within
3G(gravity). Thus alarm threshold is set to 4G. Simulate crash
is tested 30 times in a row, consequent succeeded to alarm
every time. The relations between a group of data about three-
axis acceleration and time are shown in Fig.9, analyzed by
MATLAB.

14
Th e X a x is
12 Th e Y a x is
Th e Z a x is
10
Fig.7 Satellite positioning effect picture
8
B. Remote control Test

Acceleration (G)
6
Via PC or cell phone platform, some terminal instructions
are given to monitor the real-time condition. As shown in Fig.8, 4

a protection command is sent by the platform.The terminal is 2

entered into the state then, with the device in a low-power deep
0
sleep mode.
-2

-4

-6
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500 5000

Time(ms)
Fig.9 The sampling data of acceleration

VI. CONCLUSION
A novel monitoring system of electric vehicle is provided
in this paper. The advantage of Internet of thing technology is
used to connect the electric vehicle, platforms and people
Fig.8.Remote controlling effect picture
together. By utilizing PC or cell phone, the monitoring of the
real-time condition is more convenient and reliable. It has the
C. Alarm Test advantages of small cubage, low power consumption, high
The simulation of crash alarming during the normal driving efficiency and accuracy, owing to the integrated terminal
is carried out. A model is freely fell from a certain height to modules and advanced GPS technology. Catered the demands
acquire an instantaneous acceleration at the moment it crashes of security and anti-theft properties, it has good prospects and
to the ground. If this acceleration is bigger than the preset one, promotion of value.
an alarm is occurred.
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