Date: September 27th 2006

This year's iCC started with a day of workshops providing newcomers to CAN and CANopen with introductory information. The most popular workshop was the three-hour hands-on introduction to CANopen conducted by the Embedded Systems Academy. Using the simulation environment CANopen Magic ProDS the participants were able to immediately practice newly learned CANopen features.

In another workshop about testing procedures Bruce Decker from Schneider Automation pointed out that a CANopen device may be incompatible to others if used "near their limits". CANopen does not specify acceptable processing times or timeouts so these are always device specific. For example, a device requiring a 4 milliseconds processing time for a certain signal will simply not function as intended if that signal is received every 3 milliseconds.

In order to help with the evaluation of the physical limits of a CANopen node, ESAcademy has developed the PCANopen Inspector Test Suite. The Inspector stress-tests CANopen devices to determine their maximal response and signal processing times.

The conference itself features eight sessions focusing at various CAN and CANopen topics. Topics with a continuous rise in interest include hubs, bridges and gateways. With distributed control becoming increasingly common in various applications it becomes more important to find solutions that deal with growing applications having more than 127 nodes and with the interconnection between different networks.

A recent development confirming this trend is a new CANopen automotive standard for a CANopen gateway to the internal car networks. The gateway will be used for car add-on devices like the third-party electronics used in taxis, emergency vehicles and police cars. So far suppliers to these markets had to deal with different standards for accessing information on the vehicle's own internal network. Goal of the standardization is to provide a common, CANopen-based interface through which suppliers can get information from the car's build-in electronics, such as current speed, RPM, etc.

Members of the standardization committee include GM/Opel, Audi, BMW, WM and several suppliers of car electronics. As a result of the standardization, future cars will be available with a 'CANopen' option to provide selected access to the car's internal networks.