Thursday, June 18, 2009

Two interesting CANBUS projects and some links

This CANalyser tool is pretty similar to what we want to do at the moment and is built with very similar chips. The project seems a bit outdated but the information is still very useful.
The tool is composed by a PIC microcontroller PIC18F458, and a MCP2551 CAN transceiver. The main features are listen to the CAN bus in active or passive mode and forward data to the serial port to the PC and send data to the CANBUS. This is exactly what we need now.
Digging further in the web pages I discover that they have built a real-time kernel to run their software on the PIC. There is a company behind this (Pragmatec) but they have released the sources under a GPL license. The website of the os is at PICOS18
There is a new version of the pages here but the page about the CANalyser tool is the same.

Another very similar tool is CAN2PIC. This one uses
PIC18F248 and MCP2551 CAN.
You can find there all the schematics of the circuit used and also all the software! So this page should provide all we need to get started and running very fast!

There are some other interesting links I found tonight:
  • GNUPIC: a small directory site with information on PIC programming with GNU/Linux
  • Another very good CANBUS learning page at CERN (yes they used it in LHC)
  • PICMICRO WebRing: A collection of websites about the Microchip PIC microcontroller and related projects

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