CAN in Automation (CiA) provides the official testing laboratory and confirms that the certified products are compliant to the CANopen specification. Therefore system designers can expect a correctly working CANopen device if they purchase just devices, which are provided together with the logo "CANopen-certified by CiA".

CANopen has become more and more important because it has been accepted in so many different application fields. System designers can choose CANopen devices for their control networks to match their application requirrements exactly. The CANopen specification ensures that CANopen devices can communicate correctly among themselves in a CANopen network. Unfortunately several "CANopen devices" exist on the market, which do not at all  or just partly comply to the CANopen specifications. The integration of such erroneous devices to a CANopen network may cause difficulties and may lead to a huge effort in system integration and maintenance.
To prevent such scenarios and to decrease the effort of system integration and maintenance it is highly recommended to use only CANopen-certified devices (Chapter: Device design) in a system.

Test CANopen conformance yourself

System designers, who integrate devices, which are not certified by CiA, in their systems, can check, whether these devices comply to the CANopen specification with the aid of the CANopen conformance test tool. With it they can test the devices and evalute, whether they can expect a proper behavior of the device in the system. The CANopen conformance test tool is available for purchase from CAN in Automation.

CANopen conformance test tool

A detailed information about the CANopen conformance test tool is available here. (Chapter: Device design)