2010 International Conference on Measuring Technology and Mechatronics Automation
Design of Automatic Meteorological Data Acquisition System
Based on ARM and CAN Bus
Jvfang Jin1
Department of Electrical Engineering
Chengdu University of Information Technology
Chengdu, China
jin_jv_fang@163.com
Abstract—Aimed at the current situation that the domestic
automatic meteorological data acquisition system is almost based
the use of foreign products, a design method of multi-channel
meteorological data acquisition system was given which based on
ARM and CAN Bus. In the design, it fulfills the acquisition
requirements of the analog signals, digital signals and intelligent
sensor data through a combination of hardware and software
technologies. In order to improve system’s real-time answering
capability and multi-task processing capability, it is used “main
collector + external bus + sub-collector + sensors + peripheral
equipment” in structure design of hardware. At the same time, it
is transplanted Linux operating system to improve the reliability
and scalability of system. It is translated Linux operating system
to embedded processor, and making use of Internet to send
meteorological data in Linux operating system. Then the
complicated cabling project could be omitted, the data were sent
without PC, and in favor of constituting Large-scale
meteorological monitoring network. (Abstract)
Keywords—Data acquisition; Embedded Linux; CAN bus;
Driver(key words)
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays meteorology has been closely related to the
human civil and industrial activities. Meteorological detection
plays an important role in defense, social and economic
development. With the gradual implement of national
sustainable development strategies, meteorology detection is
more and more important for us. Meanwhile, there are ever-
increasing demands for meteorological observations. The
traditional design pattern of meteorological data acquisition
system was based on the single-chip microcomputer. In this
situation, there are many problem including system precision,
real-time analysis capabilities, the man-machine interface and
so on.Computing power, storage capacity and the amount of
information were limited by this technica. In the same time,
both the distance of data transmission and the use of data
acquisition module with PC or notebook computer cost too
much money and time. Compared with the situations above,
the pattern of using embedded LINUX system assumes a
higher real-time and stability in meteorological data
acquisition, meanwhile the hardware smaller, power
consumption lower and expansibility better.
The Linux operating system supports the TCP / IP protocol,
so it can transmit data directly without PC. This pattern also
has many other advantages, such as speeding up the
development of the system, facilitating the works of the future
978-0-7695-3962-1/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICMTMA.2010.598
Baoqiang Wang2
Department of Electrical Engineering
Chengdu University of Information Technology
Chengdu, China
bqwang@cuit.edu.cn
expansion, improving the timeliness and accuracy of the
meteorological observation, and achieving the commands of
automatic meteorological observation.
II. SYSTEM DESIGN
As shown in Fig.1, the design of the automated
meteorological data acquisition system is based on the
embedded Linux and the CAN bus.
Figure.1 Automatic Meteorological Data Acquisition System
Embedded Linux is a kind of small operating system,
which is composed by a cut-off core (kernel) and several
modules that depended on the needs. Its characteristics are as
follows, micro-kernel of only several hundred KB; supporting
X86 and more than 30 kinds of 8bit ~ 64 bit of the MPU and
MCU, supporting a variety of ROM memory; the features of
multi-tasking, multi-process and a certain degree of real-time;
supporting completed communications network; supporting
TCP / IP protocol and other common agreement; supporting
self-developed agreement; a graphical user interface (GUI);
supporting network, database and multimedia and
communicating data by the network and processing data in real
time; source opened which can be cut according to specific
needs; a series of development tools;a good property of
software open and the program on the Linux host can be
transplanted to embedded Linux system freely, a strong
technical support and so on.
CAN (controller area network) field bus is a kind of serial
multi-master communication network. CAN is not only a
network, but also a kind of protocol. Its main features are as
follows, the pattern based on the CSMA / CD-CR model, the
use of non-destructive arbitration mechanism, short-frame data
structure; the CRC data check function, the data transmission
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based on the differential approach, queue priority according to
message ID, the system well expansibility, anti-interference
ability and reliability.
The automatic meteorological data acquisition system which
is based on the multi-tasking, real-time embedded Linux OS
and the CAN network constitutes a building-block structure,
facilitating future updates or changes.
A. System Hardware Design
As shown in Fig.1 above, automatic meteorological data
acquisition system’s hardware consists of main collector, sub-
collector, sensors and peripheral equipment (including power
supply, [terminal] computer, communications interface and
external memory). The main collector and sub-collector
microprocessor adopt an ATMEL chip — AT91SAM9263
which based on the ARM926EJ-S processor. Its frequency is
up to 200MHz and it has a CAN bus controller integrated in
chip. Sub-collector is hang on to the main collector through
CAN bus.
In order to achieve the minimum allocation of automatic
meteorological data acquisition system, the main collector is
joined only several basic meteorological elements sensors,
taking charge of the collection of the basic meteorological data
(Its structure is shown in Fig.2).
Figure.2 Main collector structure of automatic meteorological Data
Acquisition System
In addition, the main collector is in charge of collecting,
controlling, processing, storing, transmitting all kinds of
meteorological factors’ data and fulfilling the function that
configures and manages the sub-collector.
The sub-collector is composed of hardware and embedded
software. In order to simplify the design trouble of the system,
sub-collector microprocessor also adopts the same chip —
AT91SAM9263.It is mainly responsible for collecting
corresponding meteorological data.
At the same time, it is also responsible for scanning its
articulated sensor according to the predetermined sampling
frequency in the working condition and sending the sampling
data to the main collector after receiving the synchronization
signal which is sent by the main collector. Its structure is
shown in Fig.3,
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Figure.3 Sub-collector Structure of Automatic Meteorological Data
Acquisition System
When the system is needed of being expanded or increasing
element sensors as the change of environment or technology
progress, we have no need to change the connection of the
existing sensors and wiring. We just need to add new sub-
collector and /or sensors to the system and conduct simple
software upgrade or configuration.
B. System Software Design
System software includes embedded operating system and
application software. We have chosen a high real-time, cost-
effective, stable and multi-tasking operating system—LINUX
OS as the platform of the system software design according to
the needs of the design.
1) Construction of Embedded Linux System
The system software is mainly built in the main collector,
including three elements at least: bootstrap program, Linux
micro-kernel and initialization process. In addition, there are
several functions needed to be expanded, such as, the
achievement of the agreement to CAN master, the achievement
to jffs2 file system in the internal memory and external
memory card, the basic collection, processing, storage and
internet transmission of the data, the establishment of the Web
server and remote parameter settings, data monitoring, the
loading of data files and the main collector reset.
Sub-collector software is needed to achieve the agreement
to CAN slave, scans its articulated sensor according to the
predetermined sampling frequency and converts the electric
signal obtained into a readable microcontroller signal, gains
the sequence of measurements of meteorological variables,
converts the measurements of meteorological variables ,
changes the sensor output signal into meteorological units,
gets the instantaneous sampling values, and sampling values
will be sent to the CAN bus according to CAN agreement.
2) Reduction and Compilation of the Kernel
Micro-computer's storage space is small, while the standard
Linux is a PC OS, which needs to reduce the Linux kernel. It
can only retain some modules that the embedded system needs
and must remove some useless modules when compiling the
kernel. In order to satisfy a certain degree of real-time
requirements, it should shield the kernel’s virtual memory
management mechanisms. There are two ways to launching
Linux, one is that drivers were directly compiled into the For the Character and Block Devices, Linux kernel have
kernel; the other is that drivers were loaded at runtime (that is, been conducted an unified abstraction on their file
kernel module). The advantages of the former are that users operations, such as open, close, read, write, ioctl, poll,
can call them at any time without installing them, but it largely mmap and so on, which are embodied in the structure
costs storage space. The latter is that drivers were prepared in file_operations included in the fs.h document.
the form of module, and they will be loaded into kernel when
needed. Maybe it would increase the occupation of system struct file_operations{Struct module*owner;
resources and running time, but it is negligible compared to the // Module owner
huge consumption of kernel resources. Meanwhile, this way loff_t(*llseek) (struct file*,loff_t,int);
can provide many conveniences for the software development. // file-moved pointer, only be used for
When the users need to modify a hardware driver or correct random access devices
their errors, they can dynamically unload the old version and ssize_t(*write)(struct file*,const char*,size_t,loff_t*);
load the new version; but if the driver has been wrote into the //Write data to the characters device
kernel, the users must recompile the kernel and restart the ssize_t(*read)(struct file*,char*,size_t,loff_t*);
system when testing procedures after each revise. Therefore, //Read data from the device, similar to write
the system is chosen the second approach to start the kernel.
unsigned int(*poll)(struct file*,struct poll_table_struct*);
3) Device Drivers //Query the state of equipment
Operating system is responsible for managing software and int(*ioctl)(struct inode*,struct file*,unsigned int,unsigned
hardware of the system. Device drivers play the role as a bridge long);
between the hardware and user application program. They //control equipment, commands except
make the application program have nothing to do with the reading and writing
underlying hardware through interface function provided by int(*mmap)(struct file*,struct vm_area_struct*);
them. For the system, we need to prepare drives for I/O port, //Map the content of the equipment to
serial and CAN controller.
address space
There are three types of equipment in Linux system, int(*lock)(struct file*,int,struct file_lock*);
Character Devices, Block Devices and Network Equipment. //File locking for mutually exclusive
Character devices can only be read and write data
visit when file is sharing
sequentially, and provide byte-stream operation to the
external. Block devices can be read and write data randomly. Int(*open)(struct inode*,struct file*);
All these three types of equipments have a rough same // Open the device and perform I/O operation
structure of the drivers. int(*release)(struct inode*,struct file*);
a) The structure of device drivers //Shut down equipment and release the resources
};
In Linux system, the equipment is generally mapped to a
special device file. The user can freely perform any operation
on it like an ordinary file. Each device is treated as a file in Seen from the definition of the structure file_operations
Linux so that the application program can use system calls, above, all of its members are function pointers. So in essence,
such as read and write, to operate it as an ordinary file. The the core of function jump table visits the driver by this
structure of the Linux device drivers is shown in Fig.4. structure.
The structure used in the procedure is as follows:
static struct file_operations test_fops=
{
owner:THIS_MODULE,
write:test_write,
read:test_read,
ioctl:test_ioctl,
open:test_open,
release:test_release,
};
In the Linux kernel, it uses the macros module_init () and
module_exit to initialize the driver module and record the
name of function that had quitted, the template of driver is as
follows,

Figure.4 Structure of Linux Device Driver #include<linux/module.h>

#include<linux/config.h>
#include<linux/init.h>
b) The template of drivers Static int__init name_of_initialization_routine(void)

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 { time of meteorological detection, high precision, high degree
/* Driver initialization and operational definition */ of automation, cost-effective, a long-time and continuous
observations, good reliability, high stability, anti-jamming,
} etc.
Static void__exit name_of_cleanup_routine(void)
{
/*The handling operations after the ending of the driver*/
}
module_init(name_of_initialization_routine);
module_exit(name_of_cleanup_routine);
The drivers of the meteorological data acquisition system
can be prepared according to the driver template supplied
above. Drivers that should mainly include CAN bus driver,
clock driver, serial driver and some hardware drivers. They
can be loaded when the system starts at boot time by the
kernel module after they were completed and compiled
successfully. Then, user application program can directly Figure.5 Implementation flow chart of system
manage and configure the software and hardware of the
Automatic Meteorological Data Acquisition System according ACKNOWLEDGMENT
to document.
The authors of the paper are grateful to Chengdu University
4）Application software of Information Technology.
Application software mainly includes system data quality
control software, data processing software and Web browser REFERENCES
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III. CONCLUSION
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The advantages of such a design are as follows, a higher real-

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