How to program a simple CANopen layer

Question

We have a robot project where the motor controllers use CANopen for communication. I need to communicate with these motor controllers using a master microcontroller. The pro

Answer 1

We have implemented our CANopen layer from scratch for both embedded ARM and Windows PC devices. It's not impossible, unlike previous answers might make you think. If you need only basic functionality of CANopen and can quickly learn the concepts of the protocol, you can get things up and running rather quickly.

You will have to read CiA specification, there is no way to avoid it, but at first it might turn out to be somewhat overwhelming. I recommend that you start by reading "Embedded Networking with CAN and CANopen" by Pfeiffer, Ayre and Keydel. It explains the basic concepts nicely, which in turn helps understanding the specification better.