The week is at its end, and especially today was a good day for the engineer-becoming-can-abled. Yesterday evening I struggled mightily so I went to bed hoping that a good nights sleep would help... It did.

The situation so far:

• This week I got 2 Maxon Epos 24/1 modules including motors loaned to me (Thanks!), which are both CANopen devices.
• I have a Trinamic TMCM-303 board I bought approx 6 weeks ago
• 2 USBtin devices
• breadboards, wires, solder, connectors, shrink tube.
• Macbook Pro with Parallels VM's on which I have my Debian Jessie development VM.

As with all mechanical development I started with the first step. Making sure I have a working CAN bus. That means the physical bus. Since I wanted to test if messages are sent and received via the hardware (wires) I used the 2 USBTin devices to make the bus. These have a jumper to enable the 120 Ohm endresistor, and both should provide the correct bus voltage.

1. Put the 2 devices in the USB hub and tell Parallels to use the devices with the Jessie VM (as of now I'll call it the dev-VM).
2. In the dev-VM open a terminal and do ls /dev/ttyACM*. USBtin devices will register as ttyACM{nr} so this resulted in /dev/ttyACM0 /dev/ttyACM1
3. See below the output of the terminal and how get the can interfaces up.
bas@mbp-jessie:~$ ls /dev/ttyA*
/dev/ttyACM0  /dev/ttyACM1
bas@mbp-jessie:~$ sudo bash
[sudo] password for bas:
root@mbp-jessie:/home/bas# slcand -f -o -c -s8 /dev/ttyACM0 can0
root@mbp-jessie:/home/bas# slcand -f -o -c -s8 /dev/ttyACM1 can1
root@mbp-jessie:/home/bas# ifconfig can0 up
root@mbp-jessie:/home/bas# ifconfig can1 up
root@mbp-jessie:/home/bas#
4. Above sets the can interfaces to 1000kbit bus speed (-s8)
5. Open 2 new terminals
   in the first one type candump can0 can1 and in the second one type cansend can0 001#01.04.00.00.00.00.C8.CD
6. Output in cansend terminal:
   bas@mbp-jessie:~$ cansend can0 001#01.04.00.00.00.00.C8.CD
   Output in candump terminal:
   bas@mbp-jessie:~$ candump can0 can1
can0 001 [8] 01 04 00 00 00 00 C8 CD
can1 001 [8] 01 04 00 00 00 00 C8 CD
7. We have created a Cansocket hardware bridge :) Fun, isn't it.

I wired the Trinamic TMCM-303 board (from now on just 303-board) with it's CAN pins to a position on the breadboard between the 2 USBtin devices. In the middle of the bus. And I sent it some CAN data that I gained from the RS232 connection from the Trinamic IDE.

I saw the motor move, played around a little, but this board is not CANopen, so spending more time won't get me to CANopen. Therefor I removed the 303-board and connected the loan-maxon-epos-device to the bus (picture below).

I powered up the device and in the can dump terminal I can see:
bas@mbp-jessie:~$ candump can0 can1
can0  702   [1]  00
can1  702   [1]  00
HOORAY! the maxon device booted itself and made itself known to the world (the "2" in 702 is the node number... which is "2" for this device. My first CANopen message.
I found a nice handout here.

Enter CanFestival. This is an open source CANopen master/slave stack written in C (we'll eventually need C to write code for the HAL of Machinekit). There are other stacks like CANopenNode which runs on embedded platforms. But I have to start somewhere.

1. Cloned from my repo which is a for of Michael's repo, which comes from the SVN source.
2. cd ~/Canfestival-3
3. ./configure --can=socket --enable-lss --enable-lss-fs
4. make
5. sudo make install
   I had to use sudo for rights issues, i got the following error during install:
   mkdir -p /usr/local/include/canfestival
mkdir: cannot create directory ‘/usr/local/include/canfestival’: Permission denied
6. cd ~/Canfestival-3/examples/CANOpenShell
7. make
8. show me where the driver for Socketcan is, but more important how it's named:
   bas@mbp-jessie:~$ sudo find / -name libcanfestival*
/home/bas/Canfestival-3/src/libcanfestival.a
/home/bas/Canfestival-3/drivers/can_socket/libcanfestival_can_socket.so
/home/bas/Canfestival-3/drivers/unix/libcanfestival_unix.a
/usr/local/lib/libcanfestival_can_socket.so
/usr/local/lib/libcanfestival_unix.a
/usr/local/lib/libcanfestival.a
9. I need that because on page 21 and 22 of this document is an example how to open CANopenShell. So now we use libcanfestival_can_socket.so to start CANopenShell like this (one line):
   bas@mbp-jessie:~/Canfestival-3/examples/CANOpenShell$ ./CANOpenShell load#libcanfestival_can_socket.so,can0,1M,0,1
   which then tells us:
   Node_initialisation
Node_preOperational
10. And look at candump terminal:
    bas@mbp-jessie:~$ candump can0
can0  702   [1]  00
can0  700   [1]  00
    this shows that we booted the master!
11. The next thing to do is to type "help" when inside the CANopenShell, here's the output:.
    MANDATORY COMMAND (must be the first command):
load#CanLibraryPath,channel,baudrate,nodeid,type (0:slave, 1:master)NETWORK: (if nodeid=0x00 : broadcast)
ssta#nodeid : Start a node
ssto#nodeid : Stop a node
srst#nodeid : Reset a node
scan : Reset all nodes and print message when bootup
wait#seconds : Sleep for n secondsSDO: (size in bytes)
info#nodeid
rsdo#nodeid,index,subindex : read sdo
ex : rsdo#42,1018,01
wsdo#nodeid,index,subindex,size,data : write sdo
ex : wsdo#42,6200,01,01,FFNote: All numbers are hex
help : Display this menu
quit : Quit application
12. ok, type "scan" and behold in the CANopenShell:
    Wait for Slave nodes bootup...Slave 2 boot up
    I saw the LED on the device change to red and start blinking again. The candump terminal now looks like this:
    bas@mbp-jessie:~$ candump can0
can0  702   [1]  00
can0  700   [1]  00
can0  000   [2]  81 00
can0  702   [1]  00

I had Wireshark sniffing at can0 so these packets also made it to Wireshark.

At this time I gave myself a slap on the shoulder, got a victory beer, and slapped my other shoulder for good measure.

I'm now at the beginning of the beginning.

Hope you enjoyed it!
Don't be afraid to leave a reply.
Cheers

This is the first post in a series about the development of a HAL driver for CANopen for Machinekit.

I've been talking/skyping/mailing with Michael for quite some time now about CAN. And in the meantime a lot of interesting folks have expressed interest in using CAN devices (and other industrial busses) with Machinekit. So for Machinekit to get some more "industrial" traction this would be a very welcome addition.

The nice thing is that the BeagleBone Black already has a CAN interface, so it's (almost) ready to talk to CAN devices if you look at the hardware side. I say almost because you need to hook up a line driver chip to the pins.

This will be a series of posts which mark my progress on the learning curve. I'm a mechanical engineer interested in automation, open source and Machinekit. I'm not a hacker-god breathing code, so this project will come in bits and pieces. Between projects i'll probably do a lot of brushing up on C, a lot of reading regarding CAN and absorbing knowledge regarding Linux, debugging and probably more.

Recently I wrote a delayline component (which can delay an arbitrary samples of an arbitrary type for an arbitrary time) in C, and that was the first "real" thing I wrote in C other than some "hello world" tutorial stuff. More info if you're interested in the issue, the PR and the manpage. Writing that was a lot of fun, really bumped my experience and it was a really satisfying experience. I intend to keep that vibe with the HAL driver for the CANopen stack.

One thing I'll really try to do is to keep the docs up to date with the progress. Then I can give people a "prrroper bollocking" (I learned that one in Scotland) when they don't document stuff :-) .

First results are the links to developing for CAN and setting up for SocketCAN ... Note that these are working documents.

Interested in following? then have a look at Issue #589 which will serve as a collecting bin.

Feel free to leave a reply!