New protocol sets out standardised use for CAN Bus and Open Protocol in future small missions

One of the most popular interfaces for communication links, called MIL-STD-133, has major drawbacks that make it expensive to use or unsuitable for smaller crafts.
As an alternative, CANbus and CAN Open Protocol are becoming more and more popular for small payloads and CubeSats. They are particular important as they work so well with COTs controllers, so it is easy to find a controller that supports it.
Originally intended for use in the automotive industry, where we see a high level of repeated components it has shown itself as more and more useful for the space environment as it works well in orbit. An activity between TDE and N7 Space in Poland has created an open source library that is intended to help the space industry as a whole, to develop and maintain a reusable CAN-based toolset dedicated for space applications.

The activity started from an existing library as a way to exploit the experience of other industries and to create a dependable library at a possibly lower cost. This existing library was chosen because of the robust code it already had, which would withstand the changes needed to make it compliant with the ECSS space qualifications. The library had additional complications as they had to be able to test the code as it was developed and this required its own code to be developed and provide validations.

The library is already in use commercially, supporting space applications in industry as part of its first deployment phase, with discussions of two to three more activities and clients who would like to deploy this commercially.

T701-605ED closed in January 2022.