Anybus Communicator CAN

The following Communicator CAN's are available:

Introduction

The Anybus Communicator CAN is a gateway and data converter designed to exchange data between a CAN network, running standard CAN 2.0A/B, and a higher level network. It acts as a I/O-slave on the higher network and as an ordinary CAN-node on the CAN network.

The CAN protocol uses frames (with Id’s and data-byte’s), that are freely individually configurable, offering great flexibility. Anybus Communicator CAN is able to map individual CAN databytes, or sets of bytes, of frames with a typical identifier, to I/O-data of the higher network. Mapping is possible in both data directions.

CAN communication

Although CAN is essentially a produce-consume network, where all nodes listen to all messages, communicator CAN support all general software-driven communication structures. It can support the query-response data exchange, where Communicator CAN sends a query and expects an answer within the specified timeout.
It also support the produce/consume way of communicating, simply by consuming, e.g.listening to, the bus and process CAN-frames that meet defined identifiers. Like any node, Communicator CAN will produce CAN-frames directly when requested by the higher-network.

The Communicator can issue frames cyclically, on change of data, or based on trigger events issued by the control system of the higher level network (i.e. the fieldbus master or PLC) or by the CAN network. It can also monitor certain aspects of the CAN-network communication and notify the higher level network when data has changed.

• With Request/Response the Communicator is a Master on the CAN network and a Slave on the PLC network
• It sends a request and waits for the CAN device to respond 
• With Produce/Consume no Master/Slave relationship exists between the Communicator and connected CAN device
• Any device on the CAN network (including Communicator CAN) can spontaneously produce or consume a message
• Support for 11 or 29 bit CAN Identifier

Anybus Commuincator CAN - Data transfer

Configuration

An essential part of the Anybus Communicator CAN package is the Anybus Configuration Manager, a Windows application which is used to supply the Communicator CAN with a description of the subnetwork protocol. No programming skills are required; instead, a visual protocol description-system is used to specify the different parts of the CAN frames.