@jay_s_uk Aha, sweet!

@chrishamm it works well on my machines, thank you again for your time on my issue

@dc42 Great thanks! Are there any resources about implementing something like this?

The realTime field will be zero until you connect to the Duet from DWC, at which time DWC sends the current time to the Duet. Until then, the Duet doesn't know the time.

Yup that's definitely the case. Not sure what I was doing wrong before, maybe cable quality.
Thanks for the input!

My initial question that got me into all this remains unanswered. It would be interesting to learn if the CAN bus can be a bottleneck as a hypothetical machine gets more and more motors on expansion/tool boards. There's finite bandwidth, how much machine is too much? Does the microstepping factor and/or feedrate affect bandwidth utilization? I may ask this as a question if I cannot figure it out myself