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The CANbus (Controller Area Network bus) standard is part of the Devicenet standard. Integrated circuits are now sold by many of the major vendors (Motorola, Intel, etc.) that support some, or all, of the standard on a single chip. This section will discuss many of the technical details of the standard.
CANbus covers the first two layers of the OSI model. The network has a bus topology and uses bit wise resolution for collisions on the network (i.e., the lower the network identifier, the higher the priority for sending). A data frame is shown in See A CANbus Data Frame. The frame is like a long serial byte, like that seen in the previous chapter. The frame begins with a start bit. This is then followed with a message identifier. For Devicenet this is a 5 bit address code (for up to 64 nodes) and a 6 bit command code. The ready to receive it bit will be set by the receiving machine. (Note: both the sender and listener share the same wire.) If the receiving machine does not set this bit the remainder of the message is aborted, and the message is resent later. While sending the first few bits, the sender monitors the bits to ensure that the bits send are heard the same way. If the bits do not agree, then another node on the network has tried to write a message at the same time - there was a collision. The two devices then wait a period of time, based on their identifier and then start to resend. The second node will then detect the message, and wait until it is done. The next 6 bits indicate the number of bytes to be sent, from 0 to 8. This is followed by two sets of bits for CRC (Cyclic Redundancy Check) error checking, this is a checksum of earlier bits. The next bit ACK slot is set by the receiving node if the data was received correctly. If there was a CRC error this bit would not be set, and the message would be resent. The remaining bits end the transmission. The end of frame bits are equivalent to stop bits. There must be a delay of at least 3 bits before the next message begins.
A CANbus Data Frame
Because of the bitwise arbitration, the address with the lowest identifier will get the highest priority, and be able to send messages faster when there is a conflict. As a result the controller is normally put at address 0. And, lower priority devices are put near the end of the address range.
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