1 General Information
1.1 CANopen Introduction
The CAN (Controller Area Network) is a serial communication protocol,
which efficiently supports distributed real-time control with a very high level of
security. It is an especially suited for networking “intelligent” devices as well as
sensors and actuators within a system or sub-system. In CAN networks, there
is no addressing of subscribers or stations in the conventional sense, but
instead, prioritized messages are transmitted. CANopen is one kind of the
network protocols based on the CAN bus and mainly used for machine control
network, such as textile machinery, printing machines, injection molding
machinery, or packaging machines, etc. CANopen is a low level network that
provides connections between simple industrial devices (sensors, actuators)
and higher-level devices (controllers), as shown in Figure 1.1.
Figure 1.1 Example of the CANopen network
CANopen was developed as a standardized embedded network with
highly flexible configuration capabilities. It provides standardized
communication objects for real-time data (Process Data Objects, PDO),
GW-7433D MODBUS TCP/RTU to CANopen Gateway User Manual
3
(Version 2.1.0, Aug/2019)