First Look at the MCP2517FD CAN FD Controller

After much delayed Microchip has finally launched the MCP2517FD CAN FD Controller.

The dev board has just arrived. It uses the PIC32MX470F512H as the main controller and the MCP2517FD on a daughter board.

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To form a CAN network I use the PCAN-USB Pro from Peak System as a second node and as a CAN bus analyser. To update the firmware and to step through the code an ICD3 is connected to the programming header.

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Without the ICD connected I was able to run the pre-programmed demo but the motherboard user's guide does not mention what CAN baud rate it uses. It was worked out to be 500k/2M.

When a button is pressed a CAN message can viewed on the analyser. This was just 4 bytes in length and not the FD 64 bytes. To see the 64 bytes FD demo the program need to be recompiled with the JPG enabled. The program wouldn't compile at the first. There seems to be a missing sys_devcon.h file. This file was copied from another demo. It also wanted the project files to be in the /harmony directory.

With all the files fiddling it eventually compiled and re-programmed via the ICD3. The new demo sends out a JPG image 64 bytes at a time.

Below is the screen shot from PcanView.

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64 bytes of data on a scope trace.

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The demo works and 64 bytes of data transmitted ok. We can now finally progress into CAN FD developments.