Talking to a motor driver through a CAN-BUS

Question

I have a motor, connected to a motor driver, connected a windows XP
computer by a CAN-BUS (through USB I believe). I want to "talk" to the motor driver and have some questions:

• Does the USB appear as a COM port?

• What protocol do I use or how do I find out what protocol to use? Or how do I talk to it?

• Does anyone have or know of any public implementations of a similar
  thing that I can look at?

• Are there any other hints you want to share?

  Thanks!

Answer 1

1. Yes, the USB device will probably appear as a COM port. Just open the hardware manager window in Windows, plug in your USB device and see if it creates a new COM port.

2. The CAN protocol of course! You have to order it from CAN-CIA but I believe it's free: http://www.can-cia.org/index.php (click on the download section)

3. Not that I know of.

4. I'd suggest downloading the relevant specs and start reading. It looks like there's lots of reading to be done.