Hey all,
Currently working on developing a few boards that necessarily need to communicate to one another.
I can go into depth if anyone is curious, but I think a general image should suffice for getting your input -- we have one "main" board that does a lot of important data gathering from sensors, GPS, etc, and a few auxiliary boards that do a number of other things off the critical path.
We've been trying to determine the best way to establish robust communication between multiple MCU boards -- our first thought was CAN, which we are still looking into as of now but having problems with libraries (I'm sure we can sort it out, but wanted to post here in case someone thought CAN was totally the wrong way to go).
You can imagine we have 5 Teensy 3.2's among several boards, and those Teensy's all need to communicate somehow. Ideally, auxiliary boards can request data from the main board, receive it, act on it, and repeat.
CAN seemed like a good way to have this sort of communication. Another approach would be to have a bottom-up serial chain where the master MCU talks to the secondary MCU, which then could talk to both the master and the next auxiliary, etc, meaning master needs 1 Serial port, second board needs 2, third needs two, so on, until the last board which needs 1. Then commands can be send up from the bottom board to the top, and data send back down the chain. This seems unnecessarily complicated, however, and also is limited by the number of serial ports available on each board.
Any suggestions? If CAN is the best way, that'd be great -- if you all have other ideas we'd love to hear them.
Thanks!
Currently working on developing a few boards that necessarily need to communicate to one another.
I can go into depth if anyone is curious, but I think a general image should suffice for getting your input -- we have one "main" board that does a lot of important data gathering from sensors, GPS, etc, and a few auxiliary boards that do a number of other things off the critical path.
We've been trying to determine the best way to establish robust communication between multiple MCU boards -- our first thought was CAN, which we are still looking into as of now but having problems with libraries (I'm sure we can sort it out, but wanted to post here in case someone thought CAN was totally the wrong way to go).
You can imagine we have 5 Teensy 3.2's among several boards, and those Teensy's all need to communicate somehow. Ideally, auxiliary boards can request data from the main board, receive it, act on it, and repeat.
CAN seemed like a good way to have this sort of communication. Another approach would be to have a bottom-up serial chain where the master MCU talks to the secondary MCU, which then could talk to both the master and the next auxiliary, etc, meaning master needs 1 Serial port, second board needs 2, third needs two, so on, until the last board which needs 1. Then commands can be send up from the bottom board to the top, and data send back down the chain. This seems unnecessarily complicated, however, and also is limited by the number of serial ports available on each board.
Any suggestions? If CAN is the best way, that'd be great -- if you all have other ideas we'd love to hear them.
Thanks!