*Drool*

[Rx7man]

y'know,.. if I were to do this all over again... I think I'd start with a better base board... like this one

SAM V71 Xplained Ultra Evaluation Kit

$138 USD, onboard CAN, multiple SPI and other interfaces, Arduino Due compatible headers, camera interface, USB host and device, SD card, ethernet, audio, LCD... etc etc.. .Cortex M7 core at 300 mhz

You'd just need to make an IO board for signal preprocessing and high power outputs and that's about it!

[hakcenter]

and developer software

[Rx7man]

yes.. good.. and FREE software.. stuff that has autocomplete, etc!

[Rx7man]

The only thing that's too bad is it's 3V IO's

[Rx7man]

I was just looking at the CAN controller on that board.. would there be any way to interface it to the arduino?

   ATA6561-GAQW Atmel | Mouser

[hakcenter]

I was reading through the papers on it, and it seems to be a CAN to CAN chip.

[...] The Atmel® ATA6560/ATA6561 is a high-speed CAN transceiver that provides an interface
between a controller area network (CAN) protocol controller and the physical two-wire CAN
bus. [...]

I'm pretty sure that's why there's 2 chips in the MCP design. SPI to CAN net, CAN net to CAN. Although I'm not completely sure. CANBus is new to me, I'm used to things having steps. TTL to RS232 etc.

[Rx7man]

I'm surprised to not see any chips that are directly SPI to CAN... you'd think that would be a relatively popular item

[Rx7man]

Oh, and looking at that evaluation board, it seems like a WHOLE LOT of stuff has shared pins.. so it looks like pretty much any 'arduino' pin on it is shared with some of the other expansion slots, and not all the 'arduino' pins are populated.. that seriously reduces it's drool value

[Rx7man]

This looks like a pretty dandy unit
AT32UC3C1512C Automotive

5V, 50 mhz, 32 bit system with floating point processor.. nearly tempted to work on designing a board to host it, but atmel may already have one