With the PCAN-RS-232, PEAK-System offers a versatile converter for RS-232 to CAN. This allows, for example, the connection of control or diagnostics units that have a serial interface, to a CAN bus.

The central part of the converter is the freely programmable microcontroller NXP LPC2194 with 16/32-bit ARM CPU. Using the supplied library and the WinARM software (contains the GNU Compile Collection GCC for C and C++) a custom firmware can be created and afterwards be transferred to the module via CAN. This offers a variety of possibilities to manipulate, evaluate, filter and route the data traffic.

On delivery, the converter is provided with a demo firmware that performs simple forwarding from CAN to RS-232 and vice versa. The data transmission as well as the hardware can be configured with serial control commands. The corresponding source code and further programming examples are included.

The converter can be used on High-speed CAN busses with bit rates from 40 kbit/s to 1 Mbit/s. Data transfer between CAN and RS-232 is possible with up to 115,200 bit/s.