This is technically a CANBus transceiver. Please understand that CANBus has two parts,
# first the transceiver, that's what this is, it takes care of physically driving the differential pair of wires ("H" and "L") to transmit and receive bits
# second the "controller" which this is not, a controller "talks CAN" it handles the actual protocol, and passes the bits it wants to send to the transceiver
Some micros have a built in CAN controller, but do not usually have a transceiver, so that's why you'd want one of these for that.
You could also use these for transmitting UART ("Serial", without a CAN Controller) over a wire pair for some distance without the protocol of CAN.
Some initial testing has shown this to work just fine. Because the transceiver is pretty "dumb", it takes bits on it's UART TX pin puts them on the bus, and takes bits from the bus and puts them on it's UART RX pin, so in theory you can equally use such transceivers to send serial data over a long pair of wires, as long as all the transceivers on the line are speaking the same language.
Anyway, long and short of it is,
# If you want actual "CAN" you need to pair this with a controller, maybe your microncontroller has one built in, or get an external one.
# If you just want to fire some serial data down a line to another transceiver, then RX to RX, TX to TX (no crossover) between a transceiver and each of your UART speaking devices, then connect all the transceivers along 2 wires ("Can H" and "Can L")
Note that this transceiver has a 120R termination resistor installed (marking 121). If you have more than 2 transceivers on a bus, you may need to remove this resistor for all but the first and last transceiver, your milage may vary.
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