CAN equipped add-ons for Raspberry Pi Zero and Pico

CAN FD RASPBERRY PI HAT

Copperhill has developed two CAN boards for Raspberry Pi Zero and Pico. PiCAN FD zero board is a HAT for Raspberry Pi Zero and has 1A SMPS (Switched Mode Power Supply). Further, the second board which is CANPico is a carrier board for Raspberry Pi Pico.

Adding to the previous CAN series, these new boards are made in collaboration with SK Pang Electronics, the seller of these devices. Moreover, both the CAN boards are compatible with CAN FD(Controller Area Network Flexible Data-Rate). CAN FD provides Flexible Data Rate, thus extending the length of the CANBus message frame up to 64 bytes per frame and boosting the data rate by 8Mbps.

PiCAN FD Zero Board

CAN FD RASPBERRY PI HAT

The PiCAN FD zero board has an onboard Microchip MCP2518FD CAN controller and MCP2562FD CAN transceiver. Further, the board offers an arbitration bit rate of about 1Mbps. PiCAN zero can operate in various CAN FD controller modes and has a high-speed SPI interface. The board offers Mixed CAN 2.0B and CANFD modes. In addition, there are peripherals like a 4-way plug-in terminal for CAN and power, LED indicator, and SocketCAN driver. The device also comes with Qwiic (I2C) connector for extra sensors.

CANPico Carrier Board

The carrier board has the same controller and transceiver as the PiCAN FD zero board. Apart from these, the board comes with a Screw terminal for direct access to CAN High/Low twisted pair wiring and a common ground reference. It has two jumpers for standard 120Ω CAN bus termination resistor and for enabling or disabling transmit input to the transceiver. The interfacing peripherals available are Header pins for logic analyzer access to digital CAN signals and for oscilloscope access to the analog CAN signals. Further, there is a TRIG pin for the logic analyzer and oscilloscope triggering programmable CAN events. The GPIOs are available for accessing the CAN RX /TX pins for software error injection and controlling over transceiver low power standby.

The CANPico carrier board for RPi Pico comes along with a preinstalled MicroPython SDK which supports various APIs. To begin with, the APIs included are CAN API and CANHack toolkit API. The Trigger API for triggering test instruments on CAN errors and CAN frames with a specified ID and payload is also included under the APIs. Lastly, the MIN API to communicate with a host PC over a second virtual USB serial port is available too.

CanPico Carrier Board

Integrating various features, these CAN FD RASPBERRY PI HAT boards come for $71.95 and $59.95 respectively. More details are available on Copperhill and SK Pang official product sites. The schematic for the same is also available on the sites. Sources for all technical details and images are the product pages.

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