CANopen

 

One of the latest technology improvements we have implemented on the electrical side of the spreaders is to utilise a bus system locally on the spreader to handle the I/O, CANopen.

CANopen is standard field bus with components from a number of vendors on the market both industrially but primarily from mobile applications. Today we use plug-in boxes with multi-core cables to connect sensors and actuators to the controls, by replacing these boxes with CANopen slave units (that look exactly the same), we reduce cabling and controls without additional components. The use of CANopen I/O boxes instead of parallel wired ones greatly enhances the possibility of monitoring each I/O point as well as vastly reduces the number of cables on the spreaders.

With less components, more intelligence and seriously reduced assembly time it is a natural step to take when using SCS² on the spreaders. This technology will shortly be used as standard on our twin-lift and jib spreaders.