Within the context of a research project, it was required to provide data from the automation system of a vessel, the whereabouts of the ship’s crew and passengers and information from the emergency management at a centrally accessible place. The focus was mainly put on the normalisation of information and efficient administration of all, mainly dynamic information on an embedded system. Implementation of the concepts, which were worked out by the collaborators of the research project and the customer, was enabled by OPC-UA technology.

A producer of premium software for marine navigation required that his software had to be protected against copying and manipulations and the generating of the software key to be integrated into a company process. Furthermore, various operating systems were to be protected with the software of the same library. For this purpose, a library which was made in Framework Qt with C++ was generated for the licensing of the software and its features. In addition, a MySQL data base with all software licences and Meta data was created. The data base can be operated by web interface.

A customer who has been active in agricultural engineering wanted to develop automatic testing of his electronic control unit software. For this purpose and at customer’s option, automatic software testing with the tool ECU-TEST were developed and tested at the hardware test stand. The target was the automatic execution and documentation of several thousand tests after releasing of new software for control units. The automatic software testing is the basis for all qualified company processes. It improves the quality of testing significantly and reduces costs.

In this project a middleware was created for a control unit from Sensortechnik Wiedemann. The abstraction level encapsulates/separates basic functions to simplify the creation of applications and allows that applications are not hardware based. The project also implied the development of function blocks for CAN communication (J1939), joysticks, characteristic lines, current control and various in- and outputs and the central error management for the software components of the library. The management system enables that every instance of a function component can permanently store errors and related Meta data in the memory of the control unit. The stored errors can be readout and governed by CAN communication. The error management was improvement by a multi-level concept which allows differentiating between service and developer.

For controlling new hydraulic valve, an embedded system of the MC9H12 family was equipped with new firmware. In addition to the commonly provided controlling for these systems, we implemented algorithms for hydraulic systems to enable separation of the inlet and outlet control edge. The project required a considerable amount of empiric testing to elaborate and verify the algorithms of the firmware. At request of the customer, we installed a multi-step error memory and achieved the modular connection and integration of the control unit into various OEM systems of the customer.