The nonprofit CiA association is well-known for its profile specifications. They enable an off-the-shelf interoperability and a partly interchangeability of devices. In total, CiA has released more than 20 000 pages of profile specifications. The recently published ones include CiA 450 (CANopen device profile for pumps), CiA 452 (CANopen device profile for PLCopen motion control), CiA 457 (CANopen interface for wireless transmission), and the CiA 459 series (CANopen profile for on-board weighing devices).

All these mentioned CiA documents are Draft Specifications (DS), which are part of the annual profile series (CiA 4XX) subscription. Subscribers can download all CiA profile draft specifications for one year – also non-members. CiA members get them free of charge.

On demand, these profiles can be adapted for CANopen FD or J1939 application layers. CiA just needs to split the profile documents into different parts specifying the application parameter in a basic part and the mapping to different application layer approaches in other parts.