CANx info - Home

What is CANx and why?

The hotter the IoT topic becomes the more companies are offering solutions for this market. These newly created technologies are mostly based on wireless media.

All other things being equal – wires are always more reliable than wireless! Axiom.

Our vision is that wireless should be used as an add-on and not «instead of wires» to be able to make reliable and secure IoT. It is more complicated to intercept wired data than wireless. You must have physical access to wires whereas with wireless it is enough to be in the zone of the signal.

What is wrong with older technologies like ModBus, BACnet and others?

These technologies are mostly built on master-slave model. It is not reliable because the whole system fails to operate if the key element (gateway) is not working.

Any reliable wired and wireless IoT system must be peer-to-peer.

Long-range RS-485 bus requires end-of-line resistors and the choice of topology is limited. This makes wiring harder than it should be.

Convenience is also a very important point nobody thought about when e.g. ModBus was created. To be able to communicate with ModBus devices you should first study the documentation, use dip switches to set up address, baud-rate, parity etc. There’s no standard way for data exchange as well.

Main targets

Main design target for CANx was to make it convenient and understandable with a very low entrance level: easy to learn and easy to use. Not only for automation installers but also for IT people.

CANx technology unites wired, wireless and IP networks

We have chosen the highest quality wireless technology of today: LoRa transceivers (most of you know from LoRaWAN technology). Only LoRa signal modulation is used but not the LoRaWAN protocol. With CANx-LoRa you can reach ranges up to 15km, organize peer-to-peer or client-server topologies with optional multiple hops. It has strong security based on ChaCha20.

CANx protocol can be encapsulated into any kind of IP networks. Any physical interface supporting IP connection can be used as a transport – 6lowpan, IP over Bluetooth, IP over Zigbee, 4G, 5G etc.

Another design target is that CANx is a technology that includes everything from sensor to cloud.

We rethought both positive and negative experiences of our predecessors. We carefully learned from BACnet, ModBus, KNX, LoRaWAN, Zigbee, Bluetooth and many others. As already mentioned – our goal was not only engineer but also human-friendly technology!