Re: CAN questions

[Bill Brown <wlbrown@lbl.gov>]

At 02:22 PM 4/12/01 -0500, John Maclean wrote:
>At the APS we are considering adopting CAN for one of our applications
>requiring some remote I/O. 
>
>This particular project needs ~32 binary I/O channels and ~6 low res. (8
>to 12 bit) analog inputs per node.
>
>Is any one already using a similar off-the-shelf solution, or do people
>generally build their own custom CAN board? Is anyone interfacing
>CANopen or DEVICEnet products to EPICS?
>
>Someone, (management), also asked me if I knew of anyone who's had a bad
>experience with CAN. I didn't, but as a matter of interest I'd be
>interested to hear of any experiences with CAN, either bad or good. 
>
>Thanks,
>
>John.

At present we're trying to get DeviceNet going with EPICS, starting with
some code from "Leng Yongbin" <Lengyb@ssrc.ac.cn> for the SST 5136-DN-VME
board.

Originally we started out with the IP-DeviceNet from SBS.  It turns out
that the firmware they supply with the card (it has an on-board cpu)
is seriously broken, and support for the device is non-existent.  I
can't recommend that particular approach.

Both of the aboved mentioned outfits also supply firmware for CAN (it
doesn't have the DeviceNet layer on top).

Hope this helps.

-bill