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Version 15 (modified by Tim Harvey, 2 years ago) ( diff )
updated GPIO STBY pin configuration notes

Controller Area Network (CAN) Bus
CAN Bus Hardware
1. NMEA 2000 Equipment
2. Chip-Level
CAN Bus Development Tools
References
External CAN Mini-PCIe Cards

Controller Area Network (CAN) Bus

The CAN bus is popular in automotive, industrial, and marine applications where robust signaling is necessary in an electrically noisy environment.

CAN bus is one of the five protocols used in the on-board diagnostics (OBD)-II vehicle diagnostics standard mandatory for all cards and light trucks sold in the US since 1996.

CAN bus was originated in 1983 at Bosch and was released in 1986 at the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). The first CAN controller chips were produced by Intel and Philips and came to market in 1987. The CAN 2.0 spec was published in 1991.

High-Speed/FD (Flexible Data-Rate) CAN is the most common CAN transceiver and is used in nearly every production automobile and is required in model year 2008 and later ODB-II vehicles sold in the USA. The High-Speed CAN is the fastest form of CAN which allows use of the full standard speed up to 1 Mbit/s.

CAN is a form of multidrop serial communications using a differential signal making it suitable for noisy environments. As it is differential the bus is made of up two wires:

CAN_H
CAN_L

The voltage drop from CAN_H to CAN_L determines a 0 or a 1 bit.

The maximum distance for any device from the bus is six meters.

Signalling and Termination

For high-speed/FD CAN, both ends of the pair of signal wires (CAN_H and CAN_L) must be terminated which is typically done with a 120ohm resistor across the pair. These are in parallel so a properly terminated bus should have a total resistance of 60 ohms. This is because communication flows both ways on the CAN bus. The termination resistors on a cable should match the nominal impedance of the cable.

Arbitration

CAN bus arbitration happens when two or more ECUs (nodes) start to transmit at the same time. Every transmitter listens to the bus to ensure what it sent was what it received - if there is a difference than the CAN controller stops transmitting. The winner will always be the CAN messages with the lowest identifier.

Framing

There are four different types of frames for communicating info and the state of the bus:

Data frame (send data) - uses a header (identifier) of 29bits (CAN 2.0B) or 11bits (CAN 2.0A) followed by data (0 to 8 bytes in length)
Request frame (request data)
Error frame (indicates an error)
Overload frame (inserts a delay)

CAN FD spec

The CAN FD spec was published in 2012 and specified an improved CAN data link layer protocol which extends the data section of the message from 8 bytes to 64 bytes per frame (not all devices support this).

Specifications and standards

ISO 11898-1 or ISOBUS (2003) describes the CAN data link layer protocol
SAE J1939 is a standard maintained by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defining how information is transferred across a network to allow ECUs to communication information (a software specification that rides on top of a CAN bus). It uses CAN 2.0B and replaces J1587 and J1708. It is used on commercial vehicles (tractor/trailers, cement mixers, military trucks, etc). Paramter Group Number (PGN) indicates the message being sent.
NMEA 2000 (aka NMEA2k or N2K) is compatible with CAN Bus and is used for connecting marine sensors and display units within ships and boards. It uses SAE J1939, runs at 250kbps and specifies a standardised DeviceNet Micro-C M12 5-pin screw connector. Raymarine, SeaTalk 2, Raymarine SeaTalk, Simrad Simnet, Furuno CAN are rebranded imlementations of NMEA 2000 though may not use the standardized connectors.

SAE J1939

While not currently part of the Gateworks BSP's, there are various sources for a source-code level software stack for SAE J1939:

Simma Software - available for purchase / license
ESD Electronic system design - available for purchase / license

CAN ID

Devices on a CAN bus have a unique CAN ID which also defines the message priority. In the early 1990's the choice of IDs was done simply on the basis of identifying the type of data and the sending node but this has now changes where IDs are determined based on the deadline of the message (lower the number, higher the priority).

Gateworks Hardware

The following Gateworks products have CAN:

Family	Board	Device	Driver	STBY	Termination	Notes
Venice	GW71/2/3xx	Use external Mini-PCIe		N/A	N/A	³
	GW74xx	IMX8 / MCP25625	flexcan	N/A	R179 120ohms

Newport	GW6404-B+	MCP25625	mcp251x	N/A	R138 120ohms	¹
	GW6304-E+	MCP25625	mcp251x	N/A	R151 120ohms	¹
	GW6204-B+	MCP25625	mcp251x	N/A	R171 120ohms	¹

Ventana	GW551x+GW16111	IMX6	flexcan	N/A	N/A	²
	GW54xx	IMX6 / MCP2562	flexcan	GPIO1_IO02 / gpio-2	R123 (not loaded)	⁴
	GW53xx	IMX6 / MCP2562	flexcan	GPIO1_IO02 / gpio-2	R50 (not loaded)	⁴
	GW52xx	IMX6 / MCP2562	flexcan	GPIO1_IO09 / gpio-9	R168 (not loaded)	⁴

The Newport product family uses the MCP25625 CAN over SPI device thus the spi--thunderx (SPI_THUNDERX) driver is required in addition to the mcp251x (CAN_MCP251X) driver. Also, note the Thunderx SPI controller only supports half-duplex transactions requiring a patch to the mcp251x driver to make it operating as half-duplex: can: mcp251x: convert driver to half-duplex SPI
The GW551x does not have a transceiver on board; CAN_RXD / CAN_TXD go to application connector
A Mini-PCIe expansion card may be used. See the Mini-PCIe section at the end of this wiki page.
On newer kernels this is configured via device-tree and thus manual gpio manipulation (described below) is not necessary

Note the Termination resistor options in the table above and remember that a properly terminated CAN network will have 120ohm termination across CAN_L and CAN_H at each end of the bus for a total measured resistance of 60ohm.

CAN Bus can be found on the GW16113 Expansion card, but note this card will need to be custom programmed and does not have a transceiver.

CAN Transceiver STBY

For boards that have a CAN STBY signal connected to a GPIO and an older kernel where this is not configured in the device-tree and thus not handled automatically by the drivers, the signal must be driven LOW to enable CAN:

For example on a GW53xx/GW54xx which use GPIO1_I02:

echo 2 > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo out > /sys/class/gpio/gpio2/direction
echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio2/value

For example on a GW52xx which use GPIO1_IO09:

echo 9 > /sys/class/gpio/export
echo out > /sys/class/gpio/gpio9/direction
echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio9/value

Software

CAN bus is supported on the various BSP's supported by Gateworks.

SocketCAN is a set of open source CAN drivers and a networking stack contributed to the Linux Kernel by Volkswagon Research to the Linux kernel and was formerly known as Low Level CAN Framework (LLCF).

The can-utils project is a set of userspace community tools that are most commonly used with SocketCAN drivers for CAN over Linux.

Newport CAN Kernel drivers

The Newport product family uses the MCP25625 CAN over SPI device. This is both a CAN controller as well as a CAN transceiver. Because this operates over the SPI bus, the spi-thunderx (SPI_THUNDERX) kernel driver is required as well as the mcp251x (CAN_MCP251X) driver. Because the Thunderx SPI controller only supports half-duplex transactions a patch to the mcp251x driver is needed (which Gateworks has in its linux-newport kernel repository): can: mcp251x: convert driver to half-duplex SPI.

You can use this patch as inspiration if you need to convert any other device drivers from full-duplex to half-duplex. Basically you need to make sure read and write operations are done in separate SPI transactions.

Ventana IMX6 Kernel drivers

The Freescale IMX6 FlexCAN module is a full implementation of the CAN protocol specification version 2.0 B which supports both standard and extended message frames. The flexcan driver source can be found at:

General Notes:

canbus is broadcast-only
no MAC-layer addressing like ethernet - the CAN-identifier (can_id) is used for arbitration on the CAN-bus therefore must be chosen uniquely on the bus.
the CAN-identifier (can_id) determines the priority of the messages on the bus
there are two CAN protocols to choose from: CAN_RAW, and CAN_BCM (broadcast manager)

the basic CAN frame is:

struct can_frame {
  canid_t can_id; /* 32bit CAN_ID + EFF/RTF/ERR flags */
  __u8 can_dlc; /* frame payload length in bytes (0..8) */
  __u8 data[8] __attribute__((aligned(8)))); /* aligned on 64bit boundary so payload can be used with own structs */
};

CAN FD (flexible data rate) support: for new CAN FD capable CAN controllers that support two different bitrates for the arbitration phase and the payload phase of the CAN FD frame and up to 64 bytes of payload.

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SocketCAN - includes userspace configuration examples and code examples using sockets
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/can.txt - detailed socket API

can-utils

The can-utils package is a sub-project of the SocketCAN project and is the more popular and maintained set of userspace configuration tools for SocketCAN interfaces.

This is the package that exists on the latest Gateworks OpenWrt and Yocto v1.6 BSP's.

Configure SocketCAN interface (using ip from the iproute2 package) (for 250kbps in this example):

ip link set can0 type can bitrate 250000 listen-only off
ip link set can0 up

Send a frame (consisting of 4 hex bytes to 0x100):

cansend can0 100#11.22.33.44

Receive frames:

candump can0

Example:

root@ventana:~# candump can0
  can0  1CFF0105   [7]  47 9F 10 00 00 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [7]  47 9F 00 FF FF 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [5]  47 9F 20 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [7]  47 9F 10 00 00 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [7]  47 9F 00 FF FF 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [5]  47 9F 20 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [7]  47 9F 10 00 00 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [7]  47 9F 00 FF FF 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [5]  47 9F 20 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [7]  47 9F 10 00 00 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [7]  47 9F 00 FF FF 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [5]  47 9F 20 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [7]  47 9F 10 00 00 00 00
  can0  1CFF0105   [7]  47 9F 00 FF FF 00 00

Notes:

see STBY above to enable the SocketCAN transceiver

Android BSP

Freescale has not released can-utils or userspace utilities for CAN in Android
Android requires standard socket programming to access the CAN0 socket interface.

To check for can0 in Android, use the command:

root@ventana:/ # busybox ifconfig -a
can0      Link encap:UNSPEC  HWaddr 00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00-00  
          NOARP  MTU:16  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:10 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Interrupt:142

More notes in this thread here: https://community.freescale.com/thread/307066

CAN Bus Hardware

NMEA 2000 Equipment

Some examples of NMEA 2000 equipment we have tested our products with:

Lowrance NMEA 2000 Network Starter Kit - Includes 2 terminatoring resistors, 1 2ft extension cable, 1 15ft extension cable, 2 T-connectors, and a power node connector
Lowrance POINT-1 GPS - NMEA 2000 GPS (12V powered 250kbps bitrate)

Chip-Level

An example chip that would interface to the Ventana board would be:

A CAN controller chip would be something like Microchip MCP2515

CAN Bus Development Tools

Microchip APGDT002 Can Bus Analyzer:
- This product allows us to try CAN from a computer with a USB port. This is for 'testing and development'
- Digikey APGDT002
- Manual
- Software:
  - Windows software can be found on the product page.
  - NOTE: When installing on Windows7+ be sure to run the installer as Administrator or you will run into errors
  - Open the software and drop down the 'Tools' menu item to start a rolling trace or to transmit.
  - Connection (look at silkscreen): D+ GND D- (Looking at top of board from edge) (see manual for Can Bus Analyzer tool if used)

References

CAN Bus Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus
SocketCAN API: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/networking/can.txt
CAN tutorial
SAE J1939 Presentation

External CAN Mini-PCIe Cards

Some examples, which have not been verified on Gateworks SBCs, so proceed at your own risk:

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