I have two nodes A and B operating on a CAN bus. I have cut the bus off and Node A reached the error passive state due to the lack of ack from Node B (because I removed the bus).
What I noticed is that the Node A shall never reach the bus off state regardless of the fact that the TEC value is constantly increasing.
My question: Is that happening because there is no actually a real bus?
A CAN node enters the "BUS_OFF" state when the TEC value goes above 255. But if you look at the CAN specifications carefully, it has a special condition:
On Part A - page 26 OR Part B - page 63:
Start-up / Wake-up:
If during start-up only 1 node is online, and if this node transmits some message, it will get no acknowledgment, detect an error and repeat the message. It can become ’error passive’ but not ’bus off’ due to this reason.
In your condition, when you cut the bus, node A is the only node on the bus and hence it will remain in Error Passive, but it will never go to the BUS_OFF state... That's as per design.
I believe if you are the only one node on the bus, there is no point in being in the "BUS_OFF" state; rather the node should wait for other devices to start/get connected.
BUS_OFFstate only from ACK errors. \$\endgroup\$