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While it is nice to see an article on CAN, I'm not sure whether it really lives up to its title. Some CAN history, bit-timing and tool screenshots, but not a single example of where such tools are found or how to setup CAN from scratch with them....
Nonetheless, the author is absolutely right when it comes to setting up CAN for the first time: while the protocol is robust, flexible and with the Full/Enhanced controllers takes hardly any effort for your MCU, the initial design can be very tricky. There are some free implementations available (Pelican, VSCP, CAN-Open, DeviceNet), but when you want to do something simple (where these protocols simply don't fit), where a bus network like CAN seems appropriate instead of Peer to peer RS232 or maybe bus RS 485/422, the very advantage CAN has in the form of message based communications, becomes a burden while designing your app around it. Especially, as the author also points out, when it comes to combining the various incarnations of CAN (Basic, Full, enhanced).
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