CANopen

CANopen is a communication and device profile specification for embedded systems used in automation. In terms of the OSI model, CANopen implements the layers above and including the network layer. The CANopen standard consists of an addressing scheme, several small communication protocols and an application layer defined by a device profile. The communication protocols have support for network management, device monitoring and communication between nodes, including a simple transport layer for message segmentation/desegmentation. The lower level protocol implementing the data link and physical layers is usually Controller Area Network (CAN), although devices using some other means of communication (such as Ethernet Powerlink, EtherCAT) can also implement the CANopen device profile.

The basic CANopen device and communication profiles are given in the CiA 301 specification released by CAN in Automation. Profiles for more specialized devices are built on top of this basic profile, and are specified in numerous other standards released by CAN in Automation, such as CiA 401 for I/O-modules and CiA 402 for motion control.

Every CANopen device has to implement certain standard features in its controlling software.

CANopen devices must have an object dictionary, which is used for configuration and communication with the device. An entry in the object dictionary is defined by:

The basic datatypes for object dictionary values such as booleans, integers and floats are defined in the standard (their size in bits is optionally stored in the related type definition, index range 0x0001–0x001F), as well as composite datatypes such as strings, arrays and records (defined in index range 0x0040–0x025F). The composite datatypes can be subindexed with an 8-bit index; the value in subindex 0 of an array or record indicates the number of elements in the data structure, and is of type UNSIGNED8.

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