Building low-cost intelligent building components with controller area network (CAN) bus

Intelligent buildings is a concept that was derived from theory of AI and has been realized by the increasing coverage and reliability of telecommunication equipment and information technology. Many of the intelligent building systems however, are derived from either building automaton technologies such as Profibus(R), ASHRAE´s BACNET^TM or home automation protocols like X10^TM, Batibus^TM, EIB^TM, HomeBus^TM, CEBus^TM and perhaps the more remarkable Echelon´s LonWorks ^TM. Most of these networks do not offer enough bandwidth for voluminous data except for BACNet, and Profibus. Robustness under harsh conditions has yet to be addressed by the above technologies. This paper looks into the construction of a controller area network (CAN) bus network (a cost-effective communication bus for in-car electronics with up to 1 Mbit/sec and is resilient to extreme heat and harsh environments) to support intelligent building requirements as well as solving the problem of low bandwidth and robustness