Betting on CAN and CANopen
by Olaf Pfeiffer
This article was written shortly after the
8th international CAN Conference in Las Vegas in 2002
[ Introduction | Traditional | CAN benefits | Recent | Outlook ]
Recent Market Segments
Especially the higher-layer CAN protocol CANopen is responsible for CAN's acceptance in a variety of newer applications. This includes many medical applications such as computer tomographs or ER equipment that gets interconnected. A further extension to CANopen made it suitable for safety-relevant applications. The solution earned EU approval so that it can now be used in maritime control and other safety-relevant applications. And in the US, CANopen was recently standardized for forklifts and as communication channel between electric service vehicles and the charger station.
CANopen is also especially suited for embedded machine control. Whenever a machine uses multiple low to medium performance microcontrollers that need to exchange information internally, CANopen is a logical candidate. The biggest advantage of CANopen over many other higher-layer CAN protocols is, that CANopen is "open" enough to be customizable. For each application features can be implemented, omitted or optimized/customized. Additional, application specific communication could be added that does not interfere with existing CANopen based communication. This high-level of customization allows designers to cherry-pick the features needed for an application.
[ Introduction | Traditional | CAN benefits | Recent | Outlook ]
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