With the kickoff of 2019 comes a new release of Raptor-Dev. Including New Eagle Licensing 12.5, Raptor-Dev2018b_1.0.12429 is now available for download at software.neweagle.net.  

Access Raptor-Dev2018b_1.0.12429 release notes here, and Raptor-test regression notes here.

What to Expect from  Raptor-Dev2018b_1.0.12429

GCM/ECM196

• Added Fixed Nonvolatile (EEPROM) capability
• Increase ASW (user) stack from 5K to 10K RAM
• Fixed output status (diagnostic) blocks
• Fixed J1939 address claiming logic
• Several I/O issues resolved

BCM48

• Enable overcurrent shutdown on OUTPUT1/4/7/8, HBRIDGE11_12, HBRIDGE13_14
• LIN Enhancements

General

• EEPROM Driver Initialization Status Improvements
• Several J1939 DM and Transport protocol updates
• Several simulation and update time bug fixes and enhancements
• CAN Tx/Rx and DBC Pack/Unpack Interface fixes
• Added support for 32-bit CRC (e.g. J1939 CVN)
• Several Fault Manager improvements (including OBD)

Register for Raptor™ Training

Get the most out of Raptor™ by registering for New Eagle’s three day, hands-on training course. With the first 2019 training scheduled for February 19-21 at New Eagle’s Ann Arbor office (110 Parkland Plaza, Ann Arbor, Michigan), there’s never been a better time to master embedded model-based development.

Space is limited, so register soon!

Join the Raptor™ Community

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Developers working in the autonomous vehicle market will likely face the difficult decision of whether to build their own drive-by-wire platform or to purchase a premade one. With pros and cons to both, it’s important to weigh the options before making a choice that could impact both the development timeline and budget. New Eagle’s control system experts weighed in on some of the most important questions to consider in this pivotal decision-making process.

Do You Have Automotive-Grade Hardware and Software?

If you’re intending your vehicle to reach production, safety standards like those set by the International Organization for Standardization are stricter than ever. Meeting these standards can prove difficult on do-it-yourself systems.

Hardware, for starters, needs to be automotive grade. While some DIYers are drawn to common microprocessing units like Raspberry Pi or Arduino because of their versatility and low sticker price, they can actually end up costing developers more in the long run. Intended for educational and prototype projects, these hardware components are not designed to withstand the harsh environments end-vehicles will be exposed to on the road, nor are they compliant with production safety requirements for road vehicles, such as redundant ROM and a secondary processor.

Similarly, software plays an important role in ensuring your drive-by-wire system is automotive grade. DIYers may turn to manually write C-code. Generally, this manual approach is frowned upon in the automotive industry, as it’s not only time consuming, but also error-prone.

Instead, an embedded model-based software design approach is considered an industry best practice. Eliminating the need to hand-code, embedded model-based design significantly reduces the amount of time to develop software, as well as the risk of error.

Additionally, embedded model-based design tools like Raptor are designed to meet automotive-grade requirements, using CAN messaging conventions and fault-handling in drive-by-wire software. Testing tools, like RaptorTest, also help validate hardware-in-the-loop both before and after installation in a vehicle.

While purchasing a premade drive-by-wire control system may seem expensive at first, it offers a more sustainable and cost-saving solution in the end. Developers have the assurance that an automotive-grade system can withstand harsh, on-road environments, as well as the confidence that their system is better-aligned to meet the automotive safety requirements for production in the future.

How Easy is it to Control Steering and Speed?

If developing a drive-by-wire vehicle is your ultimate goal, you’ll want to maximize precious computation power, while minimizing your end user’s need to calculate and communicate with the machine.

Some premade drive-by-wire solutions, like ours, accomplish this through custom automotive-grade software that has common calculations built-in. For example, our engineers build software that automatically calculates the amount of braking or acceleration needed to achieve desired vehicle speed. Similarly, built-in software automatically calculates the amount of steering torque needed to pivot the vehicle the desired angle. This eliminates the need for the user to calculate and communicate this, helping to maximize computation power to focus on building a great autonomous machine.

However, should you decide to build your own drive-by-wire system, you’ll need to consider how you’ll address important control challenges like speed and steering so your machine is both safe, as well as simple to operate for end-users.

Are You Prepared to Handle High-Voltage Systems?

Many autonomous systems consume a large amount of electrical power. For electric and hybrid vehicles, this power is readily available from the high voltage battery. However, not everyone is comfortable modifying high voltage wiring.

Without the right experience, navigating this process can be time-consuming, expensive, and even risky as any error could lead to a dangerous malfunction. If you don’t have the expertise, budget or timeline to accomplish high-voltage system modification independently, augmenting your team with safety-certified engineering experts can help.

Similarly, opting for a premade drive-by-wire kit can give you greater confidence in your vehicle’s high-voltage safety and sustainability. Kits like ours, for example, include the OEM connectors, sealed junction boxes, and high voltage interlock system (HVIL) protection needed to ensure modifications meet industry safety standards.

Above All, Consider Flexibility

If your goal is to create the best autonomous vehicle you can, you’ll want to make a decision that is, above all, safe and flexible. While building your own drive-by-wire system from scratch may, at first, seem like the best way to accomplish this, it’s important to note the considerable time and safety risks that come with doing so.

Instead, consider a premade, customizable drive-by-wire solution that is better aligned to meet safety standards. With ones like New Eagle’s that can be customized for nearly any vehicle, successful plug-and-play drive-by-wire control may actually prove better-aligned with your project’s goals.

For more information about drive-by-wire systems, or to discuss another other control system challenge, contact New Eagle’s team of engineering experts.

Did you catch New Eagle in the November 2018 MATLAB Digest? As an official MathWorks partner, the digest featured Raptor™ as an ideal model-based software development platform to assist developers from prototype through production.

What is Raptor™?

Raptor™ is a family of tools that allows users to develop software directly in the Simulink environment using both Simulink-native and customizable library blocks. After code is generated and debugged using online calibration techniques, it can target production-ready controllers, displays/HMIs, and other off-the-shelf hardware. With development, calibration, test and connectivity options, Raptor offers an alternate approach to coding that is more efficient and cost-effective than traditional programing.

Find Out More

To learn more about Raptor and MathWorks, check out the MathWorks website. To learn more about New Eagle’s Raptor, read more here or watch the video below.

When planning your vehicle development strategy, have you considered how you will address the safety requirements your machine must meet to move into production? Scrambling to meet these requirements can keep your vehicle stuck in development with expensive rework, instead of out on the road. Avoid this by understanding what you need to know about ISO 26262.

Before we get into ISO 26262, it’s important to first understand Automotive Safety Integrity Levels (ASIL). ASIL dictates the safety thresholds that apply to the development of functional safety of electrical and electronic (E/E) components for vehicles. In order to be considered road safe, vehicles intended for production must meeting or exceeding ASIL thresholds. While this may be new territory, it is critical to creating a safe machine and avoiding legal liability.

ASIL grades vehicle safety based on risk of hazard. Systems within the vehicle are awarded either a QM, A, B, C, or D ranking. “QM” is the lowest risk of hazard, and “D” the highest. With this type of ranking, ASIL defines what needs to be done in development of the associated systems in order to ensure that E/E systems are designed and tested with the appropriate levels of integrity.

The goal of these ASIL classifications is to ensure that there are no safety-related single points of failure (SPFs) in the electrical system of a vehicle.

This is important because it challenges engineers to consider events of malfunction, allowing them to address potential problems in development rather than discovering them in post-production which could result in the expensive rework, timeline delays, and safety risks to the end-users: the drivers.

If your intent is to contribute to putting a vehicle into production through designing any of the electronic systems, you should be considering the ISO26262 process. Failure to correctly meet these standards or perform an accurate hazard and risk assessment (HARA) could create liabilities for the manufacturer, who could be legally culpable in the event of an accident.

The ISO 26262 process can be complex and overwhelming. Although the standard has been around for over eight years, it is still relatively new for many companies and engineers and can be difficult to know how to apply it to the many unique applications and vehicle platforms. There are also special provisions for unique circumstances such as low volume production and commercial vehicles that are important to consider. New Eagle is experienced in applying the standard to a variety of different applications and powertrain control strategies.

When developing, it is key to have effective tools in order to help increase your team’s capability. Different tools may assist in the requirements traceability, efficiency of code authorship, fault tree analysis, and requirements based testing of the system. New Eagle offers an embedded model-based development tool (eMBD), Raptor-Dev, which significantly increases the efficiency of software development and can be used with associated Mathworks™ toolboxes to provide traceability back to the requirements. Additionally, New Eagle offers Raptor-Test to perform automated regression tests of the software and hardware together to make sure that the system meets the requirements during the final stages of development.

In order to correctly comply with ASILs and meet ISO 26262, safety should be at the center of your control system strategy. Selecting control engineers who are Automotive Functional Safety Engineers (AFSEs) or Professionals (AFSPs), to serve as project-leads, for example, can help your engineering teams get into the habit of repeatedly evaluating work to look for any errors, redundancies, and SPFs that could cause malfunctions in end-vehicles.

AFSEs have successfully completed rigorous training that covers the best safety practices in everything from hardware and software design to correct execution of HARAs. This assures that the engineers are safely developing control systems that meet or exceed ISO 26262 requirements.

If you’re concerned about meeting ASIL requirements and ISO 26262 because your team is not AFS certified, an engineering service consultant like New Eagle can help by augmenting your team. With the ability to assist with E/E system design, performing and documenting the necessary HARAs and confirming the safety of your vehicle, our engineers can help move your machine more quickly–and safely–into production.

When New Eagle began in 2008, it was the brainchild of visionary husband-and-wife duo, Rich and Mickey Swortzel. With respective backgrounds in engineering and business, the couple decided to take their idea to make control software development faster, safer and easier for developers to the market by launching a small software startup in the way many do: out of their living room.

Rapid Growth, Award-Winning Team

Ten years later, New Eagle has multiple locations serving a global customer base. While no longer operating out of the Swortels’ home, New Eagle remains headquartered in Ann Arbor, the heart of a thriving tech and research community. With access to Detroit’s growing mobility market, New Eagle serves as a thought-leader and trusted partner for electric and autonomous control solutions for emerging machines.

Named Ann Arbor’s Coolest Place to Work by Crain’s Content Studio Detroit and recipient of the 2017 Best of MichBusiness Award in the technology category, New Eagle has driven both economic and technological advancement locally and globally.

Grounded by Values

Though New Eagle may have launched into flight from the right idea at the right time, Mickey and Rich attribute their business’s sustained growth to its team and foundational values.

“We’ve got a great crew here. Really incredible, savvy people who are passionate about doing what they do well. Our values, I think, are what drive that. We haven’t lost sight of what we stand for, even a decade later,” comments Mickey. “Teamwork, excellence, charity, integrity and passion – that’s important, and our team gets that. Everything that comes out of New Eagle has those values woven into it.”

Rich shares his wife’s enthusiasm. “We grew incredibly quickly in ten years. Our partners, suppliers, and team, of course, have driven our success, and we’re very grateful. I’m excited to see where we’ll be in another decade.”

Summer 2018 might be coming to a close, but with so much going on at New Eagle, you’d hardly notice things cooling down! As we motor into fall, check out what’s happened in our 2018 third-quarter recap.

New Hardware Offerings

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added new product offerings to our shelves that make it even easier for you to take control of your machine’s electrification process.

Introducing the GCM80 EV-HEV supervisory controller

The GCM80 is the newest controller in the Raptor family of vehicle controllers. Featuring dual microprocessors and 4 CAN channels, it offers many discrete inputs and outputs to safely perform your EV or HEV design. You can easily program the GCM80 using the unique Embedded Model-Based Development (eMBD) technique with Raptor software tools. The GCM80 can be purchased as a component, or in a New Eagle system built on the Raptor control platform. Single-unit DC-DC converters are available, as are combined unis to make integration even easier. Learn more by contacting our team.

New EV High Voltage products

Our new EV High Voltage products, like the 1.5 KW DC-DC converter and the Combined Charger/DC-DC Converter and PDU for 400V systems, are now available as components or in a New Eagle system built on the Raptor control platform. Single unit Chargers, DC-DC converters are available, as are combined units to make your integration effort easier. Learn more by contacting our team.

New Eagle Awarded Crain’s Detroit 2018 Cool Place to Work

Crain’s Detroit Business has awarded New Eagle with a 2018 Cool Place to Work award in recognition of our company culture, employee benefits and overall team satisfaction. On its list of 100 winning companies, New Eagle earned Ann Arbor’s number one spot and metro-Detroit’s fifth spot. Check out the coverage on Crain’s Detroit and Ann Arbor SPARK!

We’re chalking the W up to an awesome team, a great set of partners and suppliers, and, of course, a set of corporate values that keep our eagle eyes focused not just on working well, but on doing good in the world. Interested in joining our team? Learn more about career opportunities here.

New Eagle at the Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Tech Expo

New Eagle exhibited at Novi, Michigan’s Electric & Hybrid Vehicle Technology Expo (EVT) on Sept 11-13 in booth 316. We had a great time showcasing our latest EV/HEV innovations and connecting with our partners and suppliers!

The annual EVT Expo features the latest and greatest EV/HEV technology all under one roof. It’s a can’t-miss show, but if you couldn’t make it this year, no worries – just check out our refreshed EV page  to learn how New Eagle can help you take control of your next EV/HEV development cycle!

Let’s Innovate Together

From all of us at New Eagle, we wish you a wonderful autumn. As always, don’t hesitate to contact our team of experts if you have any questions. We’re committed to your success as together, we develop a better world through technology.

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New Eagle has been awarded one of Crain’s Detroit 2018 Cool Places to Work! The award recognizes employers that take extra steps to make employees feel appreciated, as determined in-part by the benefits and perks offered by the company, and by the sentiment of the employees themselves.

Supportive leaders, strong values

With a strong, supportive leadership team and a culture rooted in values that put people first, we’re thrilled that New Eagle has been recognized as a leader among Michigan businesses.

A range of opportunity

New Eagle offers a variety of employment opportunities, ranging from business and supply chain to software and systems engineering. We are proud of our crew that, despite different roles, still manages to work together as an optimistic and united team.

Come soar with us

As a company, we firmly believe it’s our people that let us soar like eagles. We’re always looking for bright-and-brainy team players to join our award-winning business. If you’re interested, check out our open positions to see if there’s one for you.