Using multiple PCI CAN in one PC

[samup]

Dear Sirs,

in one of our application it would be necessary to use multiple PCI CAN Cards in one PC. Is there any limitation, how many cards can be installes on one system? If I use several CAN Interfaces, should I use a more powerful PC or it is fully bus load dependent (I need to process all messages)? Thanks for the response in advance, best regards,

Peter Samu

Development engineer

BALLUFF

[DirkW]

Hi Peter,

It realy depends on what you would like to do. Technically the limit is 32 2-port boards in one system. 😉

But if you have to receive high busloads or transmit lots of IDs I would recommend single port boards because the onboard processor handles both ports on a single board at the same time and if one port receives high busload, the processor might not be able to handle the second port with the same performance.

And if you receive high busloads on multiple boards, the driver might have problems to transfer all the data, because of PCI bus bandwidth limitations.

I would consider 70 % busload as high and think 8 single port boards receiving 70 % busload should work.

A two core processor could help processing and receiving at the same time.

DirkW