I'm doing a project that entails communicating with the arduino through C
Communicating from what to the Arduino? Two directional or one?
and using a CANBus shield to control a robotic hand.
Standard questions. Which shield? Which hand?
My problem is that I have a pretty basic understanding of C++ language
That's a problem?
need to be able to send messages to the hand in the format of 0x101, 0x102... which refers to the mailbox ID for each digit.
So, what's the problem?
I don't know how much more info you guys would need to help me but it has a message payload of 2 words
First thing would be knowing what "it" refers to.
I'm thinking of connecting the Arduino to the shield using pins 10-13 and I dont know if each pin somehow corresponds to the digits individually.
That seems unlikely. If I look at my hand, there are at least 15 joints in the fingers alone. If each joint used a pin, then you'd need a lot more pins that 10 to 13.
Matlab has a toolbox that has simple functions to code the messages in the format that I have them in except I can find similar ones for C.
Explain what the input (to Matlab) is, and what the message looks like, and I'll bet we can help you spot the pattern.