
Modern cars may have up to 50 to 100 sensor for control and monitoring the automobile status. With more and more features being added to cars like autonomous driving, airbag systems, smart car systems, sensors units continue to increase. With sensor units delivering important information like speed and etc, any miscommunication or loss of data could lead to fatal accidents. Thus, standard simple communication protocols like UART, I2C, SPI, are not suitable because they are not as reliable as CAN communication.
CAN which stands for Controller Area Network is used to allow microcontrollers and devices to communicate with each other within a vehicle without a host computer. The CAN bus is in fact a good communication protocol for many applications that use multiple distributed MCUs and sensors which need to interact with each other such as in factory automation or robotics.
The MCP2515 CAN Bus Interface Module implements the CAN 2.0B protocol for robust distributed MCU communication networks.
Specifications
- Operating Voltage: 5V.
- Up to 1000 meter bus length
- Up to 1Mb/s bus speed
- SPI interface
Arduino MCP2515 CAN Bus Interface Tutorial.