- Up to 1Mb/s bus speed
- Up to 1000 meter bus length
- Standard and extended data and remote frames
- One-shot mode
- Interrupt output
- SPI interface
- TJA1050 line driver
- 5V Operation
CAN stands for Controller Area Network and it is often thought of as primarily an automotive communication bus since it is the standard for use with automobiles to connect all the electronics and sensors together and is brought out to the outside world via the ODB-II interface.
The CAN bus is in fact a good communication bus for many applications that use multiple distributed MCUs which need to interact with each other such as in factory automation or robotics.
The key features of the CAN bus is that it uses only 2 wires for bus communications and all MCUs connect to these same 2 wires. The CAN bus hardware handles moving the messages through the bus with collision prevention and error correction without requiring any MCU overhead. The messages use message content based IDs rather than MCU IDs, so all CAN bus hardware can access and filter out the messages that are of interest to its associated MCU (node).
