Anyone using the CAN bus ?

[Gary Rowan]

I ran across a u-tube video the other day about the CAN bus, primarily used in the automotive industry in vehicles.

Has anyone here used the CAN bus on their layout?

Pro's & Con's? Difficulties? Successes?

I'm thinking it would greatly simplify my layout controls and communications interconnections, but I don't want to waste a lot of time redesigning for something that won't work.

Thanks in advance.

[Ike the BN Freak]

Digitrax, and I believe NCE, use loconet, which allows various modules to talk to each other along with the command station. JMRI can interface with Loconet also, so you can use it for transponding, signalling, etc, and view it on a computer screen

[pbender]

OpenLCB ( which has been adopted by the NMRA as LCC - see https://openlcb.org/ ) is mostly implemented using CAN bus.

Rr-cirkits has a few nice OpenLCB nodes built using CAN. See http://rrcirkits.com/

Paul

[pbender]

Digitrax, and I believe NCE, use loconet, which allows various modules to talk to each other along with the command station. JMRI can interface with Loconet also, so you can use it for transponding, signalling, etc, and view it on a computer screen

NCE does not use LocoNet.

NCE’s command bus is called Cabbus. It is based on RS485.

Paul

[sid]

wait did he say cannabis :lol::innocent:

[techhobbies]

Now that CAN connection peripherals are coming down in price due to more use in more industries, it will find it's way into uses like MRR's. As stated above, LCC is using it, because it's cheap, two wire, and the signal can go quite a long way without degradation.

However, the bus for MRR's is largely irrelevant unless someone tries to implement DCC over carrier pigeon I suppose. The equipment that does the signaling is the priority. I've been doing a bit of LCC investigation, mostly because I follow along with the DCCCommandStation work on ESP32 (though that seems to have stopped recently). He supports most of the carrier signaling like CAN and RS485 natively to be able to communicate with different types of devices, though he was pretty focused on LCC most recently.

I wouldn't be surprised to see a bigger vendor make a change to CAN at some point. Less wires and more reliability is always nice. RS485 is reliable, but complicated in a lot of ways that CAN/Ethernet and other bus options are not.