You can find a complete written hands-on review of the Renesas CAN Dev Kit (RCDK8C) on the evalkits.com Web site. I shot the video review last week but it might take another week or so to get edited and appear on the site. Find the review directly at: www.evalkits.com/kit/Renesas-R8C-CAN-LIN-Development-Kit.

This kit offers developers a way to communicate over the Controller Area Network (CAN) used in automotive electronic, industrial controls, and other products. The 2-wire CAN bus uses differential signaling and can operate over modest distances. A software protocol governs how communications occur. Renesas supplies two development boards with ready-to-use CAN-bus connections, an LCD, and some pushbuttons and LEDs. It took little time to set up the hardware and run two demonstrations already programmed in the microcontroller's flash memory. Overall, the hardware was easy to work with.

But not so the software. I tried for several hours to adapt the demo code so I could easily transfer information to and from the dev boards. The code seemed scrambled, with bits and pieces spread among many include files and header files. The dearth of comments and lack of a flow chart increased the difficulty of the task. Although Renesas provides a nice IDE (the High-Performance Embedded Workshop, or HEW), the absence of simple, easy-to-understand tutorials and basic driver code reduces the value of this kit.

Don't give up, though. I contacted the Renesas tech-support people about my problem using the supplied code and they responded quickly with simple code that I quickly modified to support my own bidirectional communication tasks on the bus. Renesas should have that code available on its Web site and perhaps on the RenesasRulz site, too.

When Renesas adds some tutorials and explanations of how to perform simple communications, the kit will get a better rating and developers will find it more useful. Perhaps I'll have another chance to review the added information and report on my experiences.

--Jon Titus