Elduino CAN128 - CAN bus enabled Arduino compatible board

Playing with Arduino mega 2560 board I started liking the concept of having easily stackable standardized hardware. Since I am interested in electric vehicles, car electronics and CAN bus in cars I started looking for Arduino version with CAN support. Quick research gave me the only solution - an Arduino shield which uses SPI-CAN converter. This is a nice implementation of CAN bus on Arduino powered device, but it is still not what I was looking for. During a couple of long nights I came up with a concept of my own version of Arduino board which would have the AT90CAN series microcontroller as a heart.

I have chosen this microcontroller because I have been using it for a couple of years now in various automotive hacks. Since I want the board to be as versatile as possible, I have chosen the AT90CAN128 microcontroller. It is a bit more expensive, but features more RAM and FLASH memory. This will less likely keep you wondering how to reduce the size of your firmware to make it fit the microcontroller. Elduino CAN128 board has a couple of nice non-standard features:

Switching DC/DC power supply for 5V rail. This power supply is more efficient, can take input voltages up to 24V and provide a huge 1.2A current for external shields.

Selectable core voltage. Sometimes you want to use sensors or other devices that are powered by 3.3V and accepts only 3.3V signal levels. In order to interface with these devices you will have to have some kind of voltage level converters which will take up space and make your gadged more messy. With Elduino CAN128 you can select the core voltage for the board between 3.3V and 5V. This solves the different voltage logic level problem

Micro SD card slot. When you are working with CAN bus in the car you often want to log some of the values. It gets complicated if you don't have too much memory left for your logs. In order to solve this issue, a micro SD card slot is embedded to the board.

CAN connectivity with optional bus termination. This is the main feature that makes Elduino CAN128 board different from regular Arduino boards. It has a hardware driven CAN controller embedded in the microcontroller. This means that you won't have to connect any shields on your board, neither you will use your SPI pins. This not only saves space, microcontroller computing power, but also allows you to have TWO CAN busses when combined with existing SPI-CAN shield. With available two CAN busses you can make your CAN hacking a lot easier! Also, since the can nodes at each end of the bus has to have a terminating resistor.. There is possibility to connect it on the board just by adding a jumper!

LIN connectivity. The younger brother of the CAN bus is LIN bus. This bus can also be found in vehicles where non-esential nodes are connected (such as power windows control unit). Elduino CAN128 board has a mounted LIN transceiver. This allows you to interface with LIN compatible devices as well.

Additional ground pin header for easy oscilloscope or other measurement equipment ground lead connection.

Standard features of the board:

• 6-24V input voltage
• USB-uart bridge
• 2xUART modules
• 6xPWM output pins
• up to 50 digital input/output pins
• 7xAnalog inputs
• 1xSPI
• 1xI2C
• Arduino IDE compatible bootloader

The prototype PCB boards are already ordered, arrived, partly assembled and being tested at the moment. More information about it will be available soon..