Introduction

CAN Stands for Controller Area Network. It was developed by Robert Bosch GmbH as a robust link to allow automotive control units to share information. Today it is used in many other applications including marine and industrial equipment.

Description

Information on a CAN Bus is transmitted in packets of up to 8 data bytes at a time. Each packet of data has an IDENTIFIER attached to the beginning which is simply a number that can be used to inform other systems on the bus of what the data packet contains. Because the amount of data bytes in each CAN message is variable, there is also a DLC (Data Length Code) that indicates how many data bytes there are in the packet. The DLC can be from 0 to 8 bytes in total.

The complete packet of data including Identifier+DLC+Data is called a CAN FRAME.

Useful Information

CAN bus speed is specified up to 1Mbit/s but this depends on cable length. Typical data rates for a given cable length are shown below

Suppliers of CAN Bus equipment

Racelogic Ltd www.racelogic.co.uk

Manufacturers of high performance GPS & CAN Bus data logging Equipment.

Also LabSat GPS & GLONASS RF Record Replay system with CAN Bus logging - www.labsat.co.uk

Sailes Marketing http://sailesmarketing.com/

Supplier of CAN Bus signal transducers for extracting speed pulse and other signals from CAN Bus vehicles.

Other Links

http://www.flickr.com/photos/29229993@N00/

Vulcan to the sky trust

http://www.vulcantothesky.org/ ... The only Avro Vulcan still in flying condition. Needs support.

If you have any questions you can also post on the CANBusGuru blog page http://canbusguru.blogspot.com/

Contacts

If you have a specific question or CAN Bus requirement, please contact chris at racelogic.co.uk