In November 1994, CiA published the first version of the CANopen specification: CiA 301 of one of ESPRIT's most successful research projects. CANopen's success story is unique in that it has not been promoted by one large supplier, but by many medium and small companies and machine builders.

The CANopen specification was originally called "CAL-based Communication Profile for Industrial Systems". It was developed under the auspices of ESPRIT (European Strategic Program on Research in Information Technology), research program of the European Community.

Project 7302 was titled ASPIC, short for "Automation and Control Systems for Production Units using an Installation Bus Concept". Its goal was to develop architectures and control devices that allow flexible and modular connection of existing production units. The researchers, led by Dr Mohammad Farsi (University of Newcastle) and Stefan Reitmeier (Bosch), decided to use the CAN Application Layer (CAL) protocol developed by CiA. CAL was a pure application layer approach following the OSI (Open Systems Connections) model.

CANopen for RFID devices

The CiA 445 profile defines the operation of the CANopen interface with RFID devices that read or write data wirelessly from/to RFID transponders. The system designer can choose between CANopen devices from different manufacturers that implement the same functionality according to the profile. This ensures full freedom in choosing the supplier of devices as well as interoperability and flexibility, so important in industrial environments, allowing for quick adaptation of the application to the growing requirements. Ready-to-use CANopen tools can be used for device development, analysis and maintenance.

The CiA 445 profile defines four classes of RFID devices ranging from a single transponder, single frequency RFID reader device to multiple transponder, multi frequency RFID reader/writer devices. In general, select commands (defining target groups of tags), inventory commands (identification of individual tags from a group) and access commands (read/write tag memory fields, block tag or kill tag) are necessary to control RFID readers. The defined application parameters include an external trigger command (read or write start), events indicating transponder entry/exit from the read area (including the corresponding counter), number of transponders in the read area, and errors that occurred during the last read or write access.< /p>

RFID readers with support for CANopen interface

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