Las Vegas monorail
Source: CAN Newsletter December 2002
By Stuart Crisp (Curtis Door Systems)
Bombardier Transportation, the monorail manufacturer, opted to use CAN for their new generation fully automatic monorail design as CAN is well established, has robust and readily available hardware and many options for software. Curtis Door Systems recently won the contract to supply the door systems for the monorail to be supplied to the city of Las Vegas.
Each monorail train is made up of 8 cars, each equipped with a single two-leaf door on each side of the car. The doors are operated via a micro-processor that controls the operation of the door motors and several interlock solenoids and relays as well as passenger warning indicator LEDs. Since safety is a major concern on all public transportation systems, Curtis chose to retain the micro-processor used on previous door- designs since it meant that much already tested code could be utilized and no new hardware architecture design would be required. Although this processor has two communication ports, the addition of CAN overhead could not be handled with any degree of confidence so a twin processor design with the network overhead being handled by a second processor was their chosen solution. In order to reduce development time and minimize the development risk, Curtis chose to utilize a ready-made phyCore 591 single board computer (SBC) module produced by Phytec Elektronik as the com-munication bridge between its door control system main processor and CAN. The phyCore 591 uses a Philips P87C591 CAN-compliant micro-processor.
