CAN Transceivers

July 3, 2024 ยท View on GitHub

What? I need extra hardware? Why!

Well, CAN bus has some pretty nifty tricks up its sleeve:

  • Can run dozens, hundreds of meters with minimal errors
  • Quick-ish at up to 1Mbit[^1]
  • No specific master/slave requirement

To pull all this off, we need something a little more robust than regular logic level signals. I'm a pretty amateur EE so I'll save how all that works for the big boys, but suffice to say you need the extra oomph a transceiver provides.

  1. Newer can standards like CAN-FD and CAN-XL go way faster, but those are not covered here