"Peter L. Peres" wrote:
<snip>
> CAN is both an electrical specification and a bus protocol. It requires
> special silicon to support it fully (i.e. you have to buy someone's chips
> - perhaps Microchip's). The CAN bus is not very well protected against
> transients. This means that it will eventually blow up in my experience,
> taking out one or more devices. Since you have to use CAN capable drivers
> of the kind you designed into the devices, you will have to buy them, say,
> five years from now. Also CAN is not differential and it does not like
> ground potentials and lots of noise (like running CAN cable parallel with
> a mains extension cord for 10 meters or so).
<snip>

Pure crap. It is differential and it handles transients faily well. I
haven't had a single one blow up yet and I've seriously abused them.
There is abuse and then there is me. I have CAN nodes that run just fine
inside a metal box with mains and lots of noisy relays. I even run a few
of the signal lines along the mains line for 10 meters or so (maybe a
little more), no problems. Do us all a favor and check your info before
typing.

As far as availability is concerned I found a ready supply of CAN
drivers last time I looked, and that was about 2 years ago. I would
imagine there are more now.

FWIW, I'm running my CAN over CAT5 along with 12V power for the nodes.
No problems. The cable ends are wired for ethernet jacks in case I ever
change my mind.

What do you mean by proprietary silicon? Aren't PICs proprietary silicon
too?

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