https://wiki.distrap.org/index.php?action=history&feed=atom&title=FrequentlyAskedQuestionsFrequentlyAskedQuestions - Revision history2026-05-14T15:49:26ZRevision history for this page on the wikiMediaWiki 1.29.0-rc.0https://wiki.distrap.org/index.php?title=FrequentlyAskedQuestions&diff=16&oldid=prevSrk: rename FAQ2017-09-30T00:20:43Z<p>rename FAQ</p>
<p><b>New page</b></p><div>== Why CAN? ==<br />
<br />
CAN bus uses differential signaling to provide noise resistant communication between nodes.<br />
This is a critical requirement for our applications as they may use high power motor drivers<br />
and motors producing lots of EMI. The other reason is the availability of the CAN peripheral<br />
on STM32 ARM MCUs which means only adding CAN transceiver like SN65HV is necessary.<br />
<br />
== Why CANOpen? ==<br />
<br />
Rather than reinventing our custom protocol we're using [[CANOpen]] protocol which is designed<br />
for industrial applications. This also allows us to stay compatible with wide range of already<br />
existing manufacturers.<br />
<br />
== Why Ivory Tower? ==<br />
<br />
Due to Ivory being embedded in Haskell it reduces a lot of headache associated<br />
with maintaining larger codebase as it allows to share code between various firmwares<br />
and catch most errors during compilation time. Additional safety provided by Ivory<br />
also helps in mission critical deployments such as robotics applications.<br />
<br />
Tower allows us to compose code on even higher level and allows us to write<br />
concurrently safe programs by providing communication channels which are used<br />
to exchange data between various components called "towers".<br />
<br />
On the backend side of things Ivory/Tower supports GCC ARM toolchain with either<br />
FreeRTOS or EChronos realtime operating system. POSIX backend allows us to<br />
run similar code on POSIX and MCU which is quite handy for testing or development<br />
without actually using MCU itself (especially handy for protocols related development).<br />
Additional backends for verification tools are also provided allowing <br />
for verification of critical parts of the code.<br />
<br />
== Why STM32? ==<br />
<br />
* natively supported by ivory-tower-stm32<br />
* supported by EChronos<br />
* CAN peripheral<br />
<br />
Also core clock speeds, high amounts of flash (1Mb quite common on F4 MCUs),<br />
advanced timers for 3 phase PWM generation, hardware encoder interfaces, multiple ADCs<br />
for simultaneous sampling or sampling of large number of channels in sequence,<br />
checksummed parts of SRAM, battery backed parts of SRAM. Good toolchain support and<br />
debugging options as well - possibility to use GCC ARM toolchain and<br />
GDB directly with Black Magic probe enabled programmer.</div>Srk