1.3 CAN Applications

One frequently asked question is about any other field of application, besides automobiles, where CAN is successfully in use. As a matter of fact, there is not just one, but many answers. There is no special niche for CAN; its use is universal from any industrial application, space and aviation, maritime, medicine, down to household applications such as washers, industrial dryers and even coffee machines. The main advantages of a fieldbus system like CAN lies in the reduction of expensive and maintenance intensive wiring and in the increased performance of a multi-processor system (distributed intelligence). As was claimed so far and will be proved in the following, CAN is especially suited to be the serial communication system of choice when excellent performance is a must. The main applications for CAN are in the fields of Passenger Cars Trucks and Buses Off-Road Vehicles Passenger and Cargo Trains Maritime Electronics Aircraft and Aerospace Electronics Factory Automation Industrial Machine Control Building Automation Lifts and Escalators Medical Equipment and Devices And many more… Let’s do a case study: One of the most demanding automation tasks in terms of speed and accuracy is motion control. The connection between the control processor (e.g. an industrial PC) with integrated motion controller and the motor with integrated resolver or encoder requires extensive wiring. The situation quickly becomes worse when the task requires the use of multiple motion axes. Not only can the number of wires easily go into the thousands; it also becomes increasingly difficult to add more motion controllers, since, for instance, a PC can only accommodate a certain number of interface boards. Another worsening factor is that each PC’s performance will be limited at some point when it comes to reaction times that are necessary to serve each motion controller. Picture 1.3.1

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