According to Pete: How CAN bus works
Heard about CAN bus but don’t know what all the hype is about? This video’s for you!
It’s the first Monday in May, and that means… new ATP! Today, I’m going to talk about CAN bus. What’s that? “CAN” stands for “Controller Area Network”, and it’s a twisted-pair, multi-master data bus that’s really resilient against noise, along with having framing, error detection and lossless bus arbitration built into its spec. If you’re looking for a short-range (40 meters) data bus with good throughput (1Mb/s) and good noise immunity, CAN bus has a lot to offer. So much so that it’s used in automotive and industrial applications where nothing else will work.
In today’s video, I dig into the CAN bus esoterica to give you a look into how it does what it does. This video also tees me up for the next ATP, which is a natural extension to the CAN bus topic: OBD2 (spoiler: CAN bus is sort of a subset of OBD2).
As far as additional reading goes, you should definitely check out the Wikipedia articles for CAN bus and optionally OBD2, but ISO- docs and SAE- docs that cover CAN bus cost money from those sources, so I hesitate to post any links. If you search for ‘ISO-11898,” you’ll get lots of good info, but any PDFs that bear that title are suspect because they’re all bootlegs of the originals. YMMV.
Lastly, if you want to play with some CAN bus goodness on a really simple-to-use platform, check out the AST-CAN485 board!
