Why Your $200,000 Excavator Just Cost You $4,000 an Hour—and the Diagnostic Cable Was the Culprit
I was on-site at a heavy equipment dealership in Alberta two months ago, called in because a service manager—I’ll call him Dave—had a three-year-old articulated truck that had been bay-captive for three days. The complaint was intermittent “Transmission Communication Loss,” but the data told a different story. The ECU was logging a sea of “Bus […]
Shielding vs. Filtering: When to Use Ferrite Cores, Common-Mode Chokes, and Shielded Cables for CAN Bus
I spent last Thursday morning chasing a ghost. A brand new automated guided vehicle (AGV) was dropping off the network every time its lifting mast activated. The team on site had already wrapped the CAN bus cable in enough copper foil to cover a small roof. They called it “heavy shielding.” It didn’t work. The bus still crashed. They were […]