For decades, the Controller Area Network (CAN) has been the backbone of automotive and industrial communication. Invented in the early 1980s by Robert Bosch GmbH, CAN was designed to solve a practical problem: as vehicles grew more electronically complex, traditional point-to-point wiring between dozens of electronic control units (ECUs) became impractical, heavy, and error-prone. CAN introduced a simple, robust, and scalable solution: multiple devices could communicate reliably over a single bus, with messages automatically prioritized, error-checked, and retransmitted if necessary. From its first commercial use in 1986, CAN quickly became the standard for automotive networks, eventually spreading to industrial automation, robotics, medical devices, and many other embedded applications.

Unlike simpler point-to-point protocols like UART, SPI, or I2C, the CAN bus itself is message-oriented and inherently multi-node. Its frames include unique identifiers, allowing devices to priori...