Why Your Car Is Smarter Than You Think—and How You Can Learn to Speak Its Language It began with a deceptively simple question: why can a modern vehicle detect a low tire pressure in seconds, yet the average driver has no idea how that information travels from a spinning wheel…
Posts tagged as “CAN Bus”
A recent internal market study by Copperhill Technologies uncovered a surprising but critical shortcoming across all commercially available SAE J1939 baud rate converters: none of them explicitly address the issue of Silent or Listen-Only Mode. This omission, whether in marketing descriptions or technical documentation, can have significant implications for system…
SAE J1939 is a family of Controller Area Network (CAN) based standards used in heavy‑duty vehicles for powertrain control and diagnostics. Historically, the standard specified a 250 kbit/s data rate, which has been adequate for networks containing a handful of Electronic Control Units (ECUs). Modern trucks now incorporate dozens of ECUs,…
This article is part of our comprehensive SAE J1939 online documentation. The primary document describing the J1939 message format is SAE J1939/21 – Data Link Layer. This specification defines the use of the CAN data frame (29-bit identifier, Parameter Group Numbers – PGN, etc.) as well as the transport protocol…
Controller Area Network (CAN bus) is a widely used communication network in automotive and industrial systems. It provides a robust, real-time communication method for multiple microcontroller-based devices (nodes) to exchange data over a simple two-wire bus. In industrial environments, proper network design is critical to ensure reliable performance under noise,…
SAE J1939 is a standardized communication protocol used in heavy-duty vehicles like trucks, buses, construction equipment, and agricultural machinery. It defines how electronic control units (ECUs)—such as engines, transmissions, and brakes—talk to each other over a shared data network. Think of it as a common language that allows different vehicle…
Introduction The Controller Area Network (CAN bus) is a robust serial communication bus originally developed for automotive applications in the 1980s. It allows microcontrollers and electronic control units (ECUs) in a vehicle or machine to communicate with each other without a central host computer. Since its inception, CAN bus has…
A Controller Area Network (CAN) requires termination resistors to ensure signal integrity, prevent reflections, and maintain proper bus impedance. Here’s why they are needed and where to install them: Why Are Termination Resistors Needed? Prevent Signal Reflections: CAN is a differential signaling system where signals travel along a twisted-pair cable…
