CANBus is not only CANOpen

[robotdigg]

UIrobot launched a series of stepper motor controller which is using UIrobot CAN protocol, UIrobot CAN technology is different from and superior to CANOpen and Modbus. As you know, if you want to control 2 or 3 motors synchronously CANOpen is preferred. (Is a multi-axis stepper motor driver really existed? We will talk about this later on.) But if you want to control 10-100 motors synchronously or individually by CANOpen, you will find that there is time lag. The second point is if you want to adopt CANOpen which is FieldBus technology, you should have knowledge about the CANOpen. UIrobot CAN protocol is transparent to users, you don’t need to have knowledge about CAN protocol, UIrobot use a CAN/RS232 Converter to convert your simple ASCII orders from your device (PC) to your whole network, UIrobot simplify the CANOpen protocol to user’s layer, users don’t need to handle CAN protocol, so it really simple and at last achieve to control your network unit 10-100 stepper motors in real-time synchronously or individually in high speed.

UIrobot CANBus system structure is: UIM242xx Motor Controller <<<=== CANbus===>>> UIM250 CAN-RS232 <<<=== >>> User Device(e.g. PC)

We frame that structure simply because our CAN (we call it UIM CAN) protocol is specially designed for Motor Control application.

1) It's very efficient, message frame structure is simplified and compact. Therefore, less time is needed to transfer the message.
2) It's robust, since it has error prevention and correction mechanism built in.
3) Through the using of UIM250 converting controller, user no long need to deal with the CAN protocol. It's transparent to user. Our RS232 Baud Rate is up to 115200 bps, and can be customized to 250 Kbps. Therefore, the transfer speed shouldn't be a problem.
We do not suggest every client use our CANBus stepper controller because you may have a CANOpen system before that but if you didn't apply a CANBus network ever before you can have a try on our CANBus stepper controller for your easy way motion control by stepping motors. Connect to user device by DB9 or USB (USB stepper controller) is both OK.