CAN Fieldbus for Industrial Automation
Innately many IPCs don't have an interface for the connection of one or more CAN busses. PEAK-System offers CAN interfaces for many standard computer interfaces.
To get more than one CAN bus up and running with an IPC you can use dual-channel models of the CAN interface or several CAN interfaces may be used on a single IPC. PCAN products are also available as opto-decoupled models, where the CAN bus connector is galvanically isolated from the IPC's electronics. The PCAN products have the underlying PCAN software interface in common, ensuring a unified access for software running on the IPC independent of the used CAN interface. Device drivers are available for Windows and Linux, and further more additionally documented software libraries and examples in order to facilitate the development of own software.
A comprehensive software tool for monitoring, inspection, and influencing of CAN data is the PCAN-Explorer 5. Besides the symbolic form (by names) CAN data can be represented with line writers or can be processed with graphical instruments panels. The PCAN-Explorer is fully automatable by VBScript.
PEAK-System also offers microcontroller-based CAN nodes with a variety of I/O functions. For the first steps with a CAN bus the PCAN-MicroMod Evaluation Kit is a good choice. The functionality is comfortably configurable with Windows software.
