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 The project seems a bit outdated but the information is still very useful.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

Getting the tools: part 1

After some time spent to think of what tools we need in this adventure, now the heart of the project has arrived:

This beauty is a PIC 18F4682 from Microchip. Among many other features, it spots:

• Enhanced CAN controller on board ( CAN version 2.0B up to 1Mbps)
• 1 EUSART ( for RS232 )
• 10 MIPS @ 40Mhz

This is another voyeuristic closeup of the microcontroller:
The microcontroller will be our interface to CAN bus, where we will try to listen communications on the bus and to talk with the other peripherals. It is not possible to interface directly a PC for electric problems (signals are transmitted on the bus by differential voltage) and protocol reasons (need of a dedicated hardware to understand message on the lines that normal PC doesn't have on board). Unfortunately this is not the only device that we need for the project. More has to come.

Stay tuned!