What? I need extra hardware? Why!
Well, CAN bus has some pretty nifty tricks up its sleeve:
- Can run dozens, hundreds of meters with minimal errors
- Quick-ish at up to 1Mbit[^1]
- No specific master/slave requirement
To pull all this off, we need something a little more robust than regular logic level signals. I'm a pretty amateur EE so I'll save how all that works for the big boys, but suffice to say you need the extra oomph a transceiver provides.
- Newer can standards like CAN-FD and CAN-XL go way faster, but those are not covered here