Electronics and electronic units, commonly installed in e.g. vehicles, are becoming increasingly advanced. As a consequence, troubleshooting such electronic units becomes more difficult and requires an increasing amount of effort and competence. For example, in today's vehicles over 80% of faults are related to electronics in the vehicle. A common way to address electronic faults in vehicles is to replace components until the vehicle is again functional. This often leads to that working components are unnecessarily replaced, thus such a method becomes relatively expensive.
Many vehicles have an electronic control unit (ECU) which controls several functions in the vehicle such as e.g. behaviors of the chassis, anti-slip functions, ABS, climate control, airbags or SRS. Thus, a vehicle may have hundreds of ECUs controlling many functions.
In electronic units, such as e.g. an ECU of a vehicle, faults may occur. Such faults may be due to communication errors, or faults derived from the environment such as temperature, humidity, and vibrations. Vehicle manufacturers typically program the ECU to detect and react to such errors or faults in the system.
Thus, when constructing and programming an ECU one attempts to configure the ECU to detect and determine all possible errors. However, if an error appears that is not identified before the programming of the ECU, the ECU is not able to determine and recognize the error, thus a common message transmitted to a user/mechanics is “Fault or DTC not found” (DTC: Diagnostic Trouble Code).
A diagnostic method which comprises self diagnosing is called “on-board diagnostics” (OBD). In order to interpret OBD-faults a user has to connect to the vehicle with an OBD-instrument able to read the error codes from an ECU of the vehicle. In the vehicle industry, there are standard protocols for reading errors from the ECU. Furthermore, there are databases comprising error codes with instructions for what type of error the error code corresponds to.
A problem occurs when errors that are not previously identified or described appear. A common procedure is to connect a multimeter and oscilloscope in order to resolve the problem. This procedure is in many situations not satisfactory.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds