The course includes nearly four hundred pages of notes, examples, and reference material as well as numerous historic anecdotes and a protocol calculator application.

Physical Layers

Everything from network topologies, wiring requirements, terminating resister placement, and connector pin layouts to the OSI communication model, vehicle diagnostic adaptors, and technical documentation reviews.

Message Processing

Starting with bus arbitration, large message transport mechanisms, and low-level data encoding techniques and running through binary encoded protocol structures, the RP1210 API, and connection troubleshooting procedures, the class provides an expansive look of topics across the board.

Decoding Examples

The class includes a number of exercises in which students hand-decode sample databus messages at the byte level.

About the Instructor

Ken DeGrant was raised in Southeast Missouri. After a year of junior college, he joined the Marine Corps and spent 5 years as a Light Armored Vehicle crewman at Camp LeJeune, NC. After the Marine Corps, he attended the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and obtained his BS in Computer Science. While at UNCW, he was elected president of the UNCW chapter of the National Computer Science Honor Society, president of the Math and Computer Science Club, and worked as a software engineer at Corning Glass.

After graduation, he began his 25+ years of protocols-related work as an embedded software engineer on gas pumps and cash registers at Gilbarco-Veeder Root. He then joined Harris Corporation where he worked on communications between telephone switches and external telephone line testing equipment. In August of 1999, he began work in the heavy-duty trucking industry by joining Noregon Systems as a technical account manager/product manager. He then worked with FW Murphy and Snap-On/NEXIQ in a technical sales and systems engineering roles before joining Dearborn Group as their Heavy-Duty Products Manager. While at Dearborn Group, he authored DG’s popular diagnostic application called DG Diagnostics which can diagnose light-duty through heavy-duty vehicles.

Ken has been a member of TMC and the SAE J1939 committee since 1999 and is 2^nd Vice Chair of the TMC S.12 Onboard Vehicle Electronics Study Group. He has chaired many task forces including the TMC RP1210 task force since 2000. Ken has participated as speaker and moderator at many TMC and SAE Technical Sessions and has earned TMC’s two highest awards, the Silver Spark Plug and Recognized Associate.