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CANOpen – a new old acquaintance
Where one can find CAN – and the bus system is never far from construction machines – there is almost always also CANOpen.
It accompanied us for many years, but it never made it to be implemented in the ViViVerseTM.
Though, never say never, as time has come.
September 16th 2020 by Hansjoerg Petschko
A family for CANOPEN
Almost twenty years ago I read and interpreted a CAN-message with my software for the first time. And not long after that I had the chance to participate in a training on CANOpen, led personally by Holger Zeltwanger.
Nevertheless I had to do with CANOpen only marginally. Not enough anyways, to tackle an integration or the implementation of a CANOpen stack for that matter. There had always been somebody else to take care of communicating with the devices, and for the applications I had to work with there was no general profile which motivated the use of CANOpen.
Some time ago the first customer requirement to make a CANOpen stack as a ViViVerseTM Organelle finally showed up. In such a case – when new functionality makes its way into the VVV – we first give our thoughts around an interface as generic as possible. We develop a Family description with the commands, the values to be subscribed and the configurable settings that the members of the Family must provide.
For CANOpen these were for example the setting and reading of SDOs, the publishing of PDOs as Metabolics and the transfer of domains. This Family description is now available in its first version. With this, the use of CANOpen is decoupled from the actual implementation of the stack.
ImplementATIONS
As a first member of the new Family we gladly welcome an implementation which integrates the CANOpen stack of PORT and is available on ARM on Linux.
The next planned Family member will be to integrate the stack of Embedded Office. We look forward to it!