CANBed Drives RP2040s Into Embedded CAN Bus Applications
Seeed Studio's latest development kit contains an RP2040, CAN controller, and CAN receiver.
The Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller integrates into automotive applications with the latest board from Seeed Studio. The new CANBed RP2040 interfaces to a vehicle's CAN bus and an OBD-II port.
If you are new to CAN, check out this great CAN Bus primer from Seeed Studio.
CANBed RP2040 measures 56 x 41 millimeters. The board contains the RP2040 microcontroller, an MCP2515 CAN controller, an MCP2551 CAN receiver, a switch-mode power supply, and an array of I/O connector ports.
SeeedStudio included a two-megabyte flash chip to support the RP2040 with 264 kilobytes of RAM and clocks running up to 133 MHz. In addition, CANBed makes I2C, SPI, UART, eight GPIO, and three analog inputs available for interfacing to other hardware.
Each set of IO has pinout options. For example, I2C uses Seeed Studio's Grove Connector system, enabling connections to a vast ecosystem of sensors and add-ons. Also, while CAN is prominent enough to be in the product's name, CANBed can interface to OBD-II signals through a 9-Pin sub-D connector.
With the dual CAN interface ICs, the development kit supports data rates up to 1 Mb/s and CAN V2.0B. The hardware also supports CANopen, which runs on top of the CAN Bus data link layer.
The onboard power supply operates with input voltages of 9-28 volts. This range means CANBed targets 12 volt automotive applications. The switching supply bucks down to 3.3 volts and can supply up to 1 amp for the board and external hardware.
If you are interested in CANBed but prefer an 8-bit microcontroller, Seeed Studio has you covered with the CANBed ATmega32U4. It has the same processor found on the Arduino Leonardo board.
The RP2040-based development kit starts at $15.90. SeeedStudio estimates shipments will begin on December 24th, 2021. You can pre-order on the CANBus RP2040 product page.