CAN bus connectivity for remote plant monitoring

CAN bus (Controller Area Network) is a way for the electronic units inside a vehicle or machine to talk to each other over a single pair of wires. It was developed by Bosch in the 1980s for cars, and is now used in almost every modern vehicle, most construction plant and much industrial equipment.

Instead of running a separate wire from every sensor to every gauge, each control unit — engine, transmission, hydraulics, dashboard — broadcasts short messages onto the shared bus, and any other unit that needs that information listens for it. The two-wire design is very resistant to electrical noise, which is why it survives on diggers, dumpers and trucks.

Many diesel engines and heavy machines use J1939, a CAN-based standard that defines common messages such as engine hours, engine speed, coolant temperature, fuel level and fault codes. Other machines use manufacturer-specific messages. Either way, a gateway connected to the bus can read what the machine already knows without adding new sensors.

Neo 2 supports J1939, so on machines and engines that broadcast standard J1939 messages it can read values such as engine hours, engine speed, temperatures, fuel level and active fault codes and send them to the TrackSyte® Portal.

On a machine, CAN is the internal network — the connection you would plug into on a digger or industrial vehicle to read what the equipment already knows. A gateway that speaks CAN can pass useful signals from that network into the same monitoring platform that shows location, power and alerts.

Site teams care because machine data without a site visit changes how engineers are deployed. Hire desks and plant managers see hours, faults and status that justify a call-out, instead of routine checks that burn fuel and time. For UK construction and plant fleets, that is the difference between knowing before you go and discovering the problem on arrival.

The principle is simple: if the machine speaks CAN, Neo 2 can bring that data into TrackSyte. Exactly which signals are available depends on the machine, and we confirm that for your fleet during setup.

Neo 2 supports classic CAN 2.0A/B and CAN FD, together with Modbus, GPIO and RS485 on the same device. Data is sent over 4G LTE, LTE-M, NB-IoT or Ethernet into the TrackSyte® Portal via MQTT or API. Neo 2 also has a 9–30 V DC supply and Bluetooth, and works with Victron, smart/lithium BMS batteries and Smart Shunt where that power equipment sits alongside plant.

Full-constellation GPS/GNSS is fitted as standard, so machine data and location arrive together. For plant-specific use cases see construction equipment telematics, and for the full hardware range see Hardware & integrations.

Construction plant. Hire fleets, mixed yards and remote plant are where CAN connectivity pays off most. Construction equipment telematics covers this in detail.

Common UK plant types with CAN include excavators, diggers, dumpers, telehandlers and cranes.

Other sectors — agriculture, forestry, mining, compressors, marine and industrial vehicles — often use the same CAN-based approach. If your equipment speaks CAN, talk to us about what can be monitored.

Mixed sites. Security towers and PID systems usually connect over Ethernet, cellular and GPIO (with RS485 where needed), while plant connects over CAN. Neo 2 handles both, so every asset on the site can report into one Portal.

CAN data follows the same path as every other Neo 2 interface: into the TrackSyte® Portal over MQTT or API. Operations teams get the Portal view; engineering teams can stream the same data into their own systems — see API & data access.

Data is protected in transit by authentication, TLS encryption and certificates. TrackSyte is built and supported by Green Power Solutions in Cornwall.