The MicroMessaging Initiative

CONTENTS
Home
Technology
Code Examples
Message Board
Committee
Contact

EXTERNAL
I2C
CANbus
CANopen
LIN

IN THE PRESS
Embedded Networking
with MicroMessaging,
Circuit Cellar, Oct. 2003

Motivation

There is no common standard or interface available for embedded network technologies like UARTs/RS-232/RS-485, I²C, SPI, LIN, CAN and other serial busses both wired and wireless (e.g. IR). As a result many different, often proprietary communication protocols and interfaces exist. Mixing, merging or migrating from/to these existing network technologies is not easily possible and requires a lot of engineering work in regards to software development.

Goals

The goal of MicroMessaging is to create common software interfaces to be used on different embedded networking architectures including, but not limited to UARTs/RS-232/RS-485, I²C, SPI, LIN and CAN. The figure below illustrates the two software interfaces defined: a layer 2 interface (driver) towards the different physical implementation and a layer 7 interface (API) to provide user/application access. The actual implementation of layers 3 to 7 (higher-layer protocol) is based on a minimized version of CANopen similar to MicroCANopen (www.MicroCANopen.com).