“DAWN is a very capable system that is adaptable to many uses. The folks at HEM are with you all the way with their great support.” – EVermont Research Director Harold Garabedian

When it comes to the next generation of green transportation, Vermont looks to lead the cutting-edge. The Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, a key partner in the public/private collaboration EVermont, is working with energy companies, vehicle manufacturers and engineering firms to spearhead research, development, and design efforts for alternative-fuel vehicles. EVermont Research Director Harold Garabedian said HEM Data’s DAWN system has proven to be a helpful and well-integrated tool in these efforts. “Through the collaborative, we’ve been looking at advanced technology vehicles, starting with electric vehicles and expanding into other technologies, including plug-in hybrids. And that’s where we’ve used DAWN,” he said. “It’s allowed us to go in and monitor the CAN bus activity and to understand the traffic of the sensors and their interrelationships.”

EVermont chose to work with the Toyota Prius as a platform for a proof-of-concept plug-in hybrid. HEM Data’s experience and DAWN’s flexibility has assisted in the organization’s custom hardware manipulations. “In this project we actually extracted the OEM controller and inserted a replacement controller to manage a larger battery. In the evaluation of the vehicle we needed a good engineering tool to monitor that,” said Garabedian. “What DAWN allows you to do is extract information from the car, and then build vehicle-specific databases. So if you wanted to work with more than one vehicle, it’s very handy in that regard.”