Controller Area Network(CAN ) Hardware

The Development Board:

The analyzer itself is a LPC-E2294-RB development board from Olimex. This development board uniquely features four CAN controllers and a UART to USB conversion chip capable of RS-232 with speeds exceeding 1Mbits/s.

Picture courtesy of www.olimex.com

The key features of the board:

• MCU: LPC2294 16/32 bit ARM7TDMI-S™t with 256K Bytes Program Flash, 16K Bytes RAM, EXTERNAL MEMORY BUS, RTC,4x 10 bit ADC 2.44 uS, 2x UARTs, 4x CAN, I2C, SPI, 2x 32bit TIMERS, 7x CCR, 6x PWM, WDT, 5V tolerant I/O, up to 60MHz operation
• Standard JTAG connector with ARM 2x10 pin layout for programming/debugging with ARM-JTAG
• 1MB (256Kx32bit) 12 ns 71V416 SRAM
• 4MB (512Kx16bit) 70ns TE28F320C3BD70 C3 INTEL FLASH
• USB to RS232 convertor, board can take power only from USB port
• 4 CAN drivers and connectors
• RESET circuit with exterman control of Philips ISP utility via USB-RS232 virtual port
• Jumpers for boot select from external memory
• Jumpers for ISP/RUN mode
• Ethernet controller with CS8900A and RJ45 connector
• LCD 16x2 DISPLAY with BACKLIGHT
• 2 BUTTONS
• POTENTIOMETER connected to AIN0
• SPI connector
• RS232 driver and connector
• DALLAS i-BUTTON interface and connector
• I2C 24LC515 EEPROM on board
• Two on board voltage regulators 1.8V and 3.3V with up to 800mA current .

The Communication Cable :

A serial communication cable.

Picture courtesy of www.ebay.co.uk

The main features of the cable:

• USB Specification 1.1 and 2.0 compliant
• Supports RS-232 interface
• Supports over 1Mbits/s data transfer rate
• Buffer: 96 bytes for both upstream and downstream data flow
• Supports remote wake up and power management
• Support automatic handshake protocol
• Supports Windows(98/Se/Me/2000/Xp/Vista)
• Supports Mac OS9.0/OSX/Linux
• Creates a perfect solution for laptops that does not have serial port and establishes a bridge between the serial devices to the computer USB port. The cost for the cable was just £4.99 and well within the budget provided.