Best solution for CAN monitor?

Le Wed, 06 Jun 2007 12:09:09 +0200, a écrit:

PCAN USB dongles are cheap (also exists: PCI, PC Card...) and it is easy to look at the CAN trafic as well as sending messages with it. It also includes an API to communicate with your software.

Almost every vendor of the CAN adaptors for the PC provides more or less primitive terminal which can send and receive CAN messages as the binary.

The advantage of the Vector tools is that they allow decoding the traffic into the sensible format, so you can have the actual values of the parameters instead of just binary representation. There are also many other features for debug and automatic testing. It is up to you to decide what is more important for your application.

Vladimir Vassilevsky

DSP and Mixed Signal Design Consultant

I second the recommendation for PCAN stuff -- especially if you're using Linux. The Linux drivers are rock-solid, but the Windows drivers/DLL seem to be a little flakey. It's probably not any more flakey than your average Windows driver, but it's noticably twitchy compared to the Linux one.

One of the cool things about the Linux drivers is that there is an ascii/char device, so you can monitor/captuer traffic with a simple "cat /dev/pcan0" command that will disply received CAN frames in ascii/hex.

There's also a "binary" packet interface via ioctl() calls, but I find the ascii char device to be very handy.

Careful. Those two have a serious tendency towards being mutually exclusive.

Of course there is. Even from Vector themselves. You don't need the entire CANalyser to just monitor/generate some CAN traffic. CANalyser is more like the be-all-and-end-all solution.

For really simple stuff, all you really need is the driver and the sample programs for the driver API.

Monitor What?

Raw Traffic, or a protocol ? Some of the Dongles are cheap. It is the PC Software that matters. The PEAK- CAN Worked Well for me. But I tied it to a VB Program for J1939. The included Program was kind of simple. The Intrepid Systems unit Had better included software, and sold additional ones. But, I did not like the User API. It seem geared toward bulk monitoring.