Re: CAN and 1 wire sensors

["Dave McLaughlin" <dave@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Ray,

I have used the Microchip MCP2510 CAN controller in quite a few projects.
My
weather station uses the controller to distribute the data from the sensors
onto a bus that a microcontroller then decodes and transmits by radio link.

CAN is great as you can have multiple masters on the same network that can
send there data when they want. The controller takes care of the
arbitration
and transmitting etc. offloading the CPU of the task.

I was thinking of building a few designs for HA use. I have a system at
present on the test bench for monitoring my central heating boiler in the
garage. The big advantage of CAN is the greater distance you can run the
network over. At my last job we had a system running at 50kbps over 1500m
of
twisted pair and even tested on 1000m of bell wire still in 10 off 100m
cable reels joined together. If I ever get the design completed I will be
selling the modules at low cost with full source code in C for controlling
them. I am planning on ADC and DAC and digital type boards. Final specs are
still to be decided so if you have any ideas for them, let me know.

You could check out the following as they do a great little DIP device.

www.candip.com

Also check out the main site for other CAN based systems.

www.lawicel.com

There was a design in Elektor a while back for a PC based ISA board with an
isolated CAN bus controller. This was a dumb device and required PC
software
to do all the hard work. There are devices on the market that are
intelligent but you are looking at around to 500 quid mark. Ouch.

Best regards
Dave...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Barnett" <Barnett_Ray@xxxxxxx>
To: <ukha_d@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2002 9:05 AM
Subject: [ukha_d] CAN and 1 wire sensors


> Hi, I've been off the list for ages but I'm back now with a few
questions
> about some project ideas I'm following up...
>
> Does anybody have any experience of CAN? As in http://www.canopen.org/
> It sounds quite interesting, since I want to have a network of
distributed
> analogue sensors that feed back to a digital processor. Hence I'm
> considering the Dallas 1 wire system and CAN.
>
> However, I'm struggling to even find out suppliers of CAN analogue to
> digital converters, let alone prices.
>
> Any help much appreciated.
>
> Ray Barnett.