The CANopen Conformance Test Suite, which is also used for the CANopen Conformance Certification is available for any manufacturer of a CANopen device and for any user of CANopen devices. Anybody is able to check conformance of a CANopen device according to the standards and to prepare the CANopen device to pass the certification process.

The CANopen devices are tested with respect to the CANopen specification version 3 or version 4, and later. The test description includes a static test where timing requirements are not taken into consideration. For every test a test report will be generated listing all steps of the test and all errors that have occured during the test.

In a first step the EDS of the CANopen device is tested. By means of an EDS a CANopen device can be described with respect to the contents of its Object Dictionary. The following requirements must be fullfilled by the contents of the EDS:

• correct value ranges,
• support of mandatory entries,
• references pointing to existing entries, and
• consistancy of the EDS.

In a second step the physical CANopen device is tested. This part includes:

• the test of the application layer services,
• the test of the EDS against the object dictionary of the CANopen device, and
• the verification of the network states and transitions.

There are two versions of the CANopen Conformance Test Suite available:

• CANopen Conformance Test Suite Version 1.1. This version is used to verify that a CANopen device is conform to CANopen Version 3.0. Currently, this CANopen version is obsolete. But as there are many devices on the market, this version will be available still.
• CANopen Conformance Test Suite Version 2.0. This version is used to verify that a CANopen device is conform to CANopen Version 4 and later.

Both software versions requiring a CAN hardware interface installed on the PC to access the CANopen devices to be tested. The internal access of the software to the CAN hardware interface is based on well defined interface called CANopen Testing Interface (COTI). Currently, the following companies provide the hardware with that interface:

• I+ME
• Ixxat
• National Instruments
• Port
• Vector