For people whom CAN sounds chinese:

Cars have a lot of sensors: a speed sensor in each wheel, temperature sensors, pressure sensors, accelerator sensors, motor controllers, etc. To reduce all the low voltage signal wires that are connected to these sensors, car manufacturers use CAN (Controller Area Network).  CAN can be seen as an internet in cars for car, that allows to reduce the signal wires to 1/2/3 wires for each sensor!

Advantages? Less wires, less weigth and no need to route a big amount of wires.

Yesterday a nice package was waiting for me. Artic Consultants has kindly offered us some development tools to implement CAN in our car: A CANOpener2 which is a tools that displays all the information that is going over the bus, and a MCP250xx development board. The MCP250xx is a analog signal to CAN ‘translator’. Anyway, I couldn’t wait to open it! Here are some pictures!