CAN-X Protocol

Modern CAN uses two formats referred to as CAN 2.0A and CAN 2.0B. These again can use at least two wired solutions. The one we discuss here is the high speed version using twisted pairs. Two newer relatives to CAN that require either a logic circuit or MCU with special port support are CAN FD and FlexRay.

CAN eXtended (CAN-X) uses CAN 2.0B that often is called “extended frame”. CAN 2.0A uses a 11 bit arbitration field as ID, while CAN B add’s another 18 bits to this. CAN eXtended uses these 29 bits as follows:

CAN eXtended SEQ

  • – 2 bit priority
  • – 1 bit message direction
  • – 8 bit device id
  • – 10 bit stream id
  • – 7 bit sequence number
  • – 1 bit message continue indicator

As CAN only can carry 8 bytes on a single message we need to use several CAN messages for some of the larger easyIPC messages. To do so we take advantage of the 1 bit continue indicator. If cont = 0 we know this is a new message with a Message ID in the first byte of the payload. If we need to use several CAN messages as an envelope we add a envelope header and an envelope tail:

CAN eXtended envelope

PID is 16 bit parameter ID. PID=0 is Envelope head, PID=1 is Envelope Tail. Envelope Head contain a 8 bit parameter indicating number of messages that at minimum is 2 and maximum 255. The first message will have cont flag =0, the rest will have cont flag =1 to indicate that this is not a message head.

Envelope Tail contain a 16 bit Envelope CRC which is the CRC for the total message payload. The envelope is only added for easyIPC messages larger than 8 bytes.

The first comment about any CAN based protocol is that it’s a huge overhead, and yes it is. But, the arbitration side of the protocol means that we can communicate device to device and use 100% of the bandwidth. It is actually very efficient once operational.