Bell Marine gateway (010010003) — Overview

This firmware brings a Bell Marine electric propulsion system onto the MUXEN bus, so that the motor appears on the boat's screens next to the batteries, the tanks and everything else.

The propulsion controllers become MUXEN motors. Each Bell Marine controller on its own CAN bus is identified by the node number it uses on that bus. The gateway discovers each of them by itself — nothing to declare — and publishes one MUXEN motor device per controller, carrying what the controller reports: whether it is driving, regenerating or in fault, the shaft speed, a temperature, and the DC bus voltage and current.

The boat can ask for regeneration. This is the only thing that goes the other way, and it does not go over the propulsion bus. A regeneration request sent from a MUXEN screen closes relay 1 of the gateway, which is wired into the propulsion installation as a request contact. The request is held for five seconds and has to be renewed; if the screens stop asking, the contact opens on its own.

The gateway also protects the bank. It watches the battery bank the motor is drawing from, and closes relay 2 — the power-limitation contact — whenever that bank is missing, switched off, overloaded or low. Relay 2 is closed at power-up and only opens once a healthy bank has been seen. This is deliberate: the safe state is "limit the motor".

What it is not

• It never transmits on the propulsion bus. The gateway only listens. It cannot start, stop, throttle or reset a Bell Marine controller, and no MUXEN screen can. Everything it asks for leaves the box as a relay contact.
• It does not read fault codes. When the controller reports a mode the gateway does not recognise, the motor is published as error — and that is all the detail there is. Why it faulted has to be read on the Bell Marine side.
• It is not a throttle. Drive, off, speed-regulator and power-regulator commands sent to the motor device are accepted by the bus and then ignored; only a regeneration request does anything.
• It carries nothing else off that bus. Only Bell Marine propulsion frames are translated.

Identity

Product ID	010010003
Hardware	CanCan v1 only (990010047)
Software ID	990050008
Version	5.2
Image	010010003-app_BellMarine-firmware.srec

There is no CanCan v2 build of this product. The 6.x images that exist for other applications do not exist here; a v2 box cannot be turned into a Bell Marine gateway.

Limits

Propulsion controllers handled at once	15
Motor instance numbers	0 … 62
Regeneration request held for	5 s, renewable
A silent controller is declared off after	1.5 s

Read next

• What you need — what to order and how to wire it
• Commissioning — commissioning
• Common mistakes — Bell Marine gateway — what usually goes wrong
• Reference — Bell Marine gateway — parameters, devices, timings
• CanCan gateways — what is true of every CanCan gateway