Design and Implementation of a CAN-USB Interface for Networked Embedded Systems

Controller Area Network (CAN) is the most used protocol for intra-vehicle communication between Electronic Control Units (ECUs) for decades. Moreover, there are several implementations of industrial networks built on top of CAN, (i.e. CANopen and DeviceNet) that expanded even more its area of application to almost any industrial automation field. The growing needs for data in today’s modern and safe applications led to CAN Flexible Data Rate (CAN FD) in order to increase the network throughput and pushed the data field of the CAN frames beyond the 1Mbps limit of the high speed CAN chips. A low cost CAN-USB interface application for dual CAN bus network monitoring, diagnose and maintenance is proposed which can be easily ported on any member of the ARM Cortex-M microcontroller family with built-in CAN or CAN-FD communication.