New CANopen specifications released

By Control Engineering Staff December 20, 2005

Erlangen, Germany —CANopen interest group has made additional CANopen specifications available free on the CAN in Automation (CiA) Web site. CiA is an international users’ and manufacturers’ organization for Controller Area Network (CAN). The non-profit organization of more than 400 companies develops CAN protocols and profiles.

Free specifications include the Ethernet-to-CANopen gateway specification (CiA 309 series) and the CANopen device profile for medical device collimators (CiA 412 series). Several other specifications have been released to members only. These include the new CANopen layer setting services and protocols specification (CiA 305, v. 2.0) and CANopen application layer and communication profile (CiA 301, v. 4.1).

CiA 309 gateway specification for ModbusTCP and generic Ethernet has been corrected, the organization noted. ModbusTCP-to-CANopen gateway by Schneider Electric is compliant to CiA 309-2 and Ethernet-to-CANopen gateway by Port is the first device compliant to CiA 309-3. CiA 301 application layer specification has been reviewed and the counter in the SYNC message added. Counter allows synchronizing CANopen devices every other or third SYNC message. CiA descriptions of the introduction and modeling of CANopen devices have also been enhanced.

In other specification news, CiA 305 layer setting service (LSS) specification for setting bit-rates and CANopen node-IDs via the network has been reviewed. The LSS finite state automaton is not compatible to the state machine defined in v. 1.0.

CANopen is also asking for physical layer experts to specify an intrinsically safe and a fault-tolerant physical layer for CANopen. Anyone interested should contact CiA at headquarters@can-cia.org .

For more information on CANopen specifications, visit the CAN in Automation Web site, or search “CANopen” at Control Engineering Online .

—Control Engineering Daily News DeskJeanine Katzel, senior editor, jkatzel@reedbusiness.com