History and Roadmap

Background

Originally written at Dynamic Controls for internal use testing and prototyping wheelchair components.

Maintenance was taken over and the project was open sourced by Brian Thorne in 2010.

Acknowledgements

Originally written by Ben Powell as a thin wrapper around the Kvaser SDK to support the leaf device.

Support for linux socketcan was added by Rose Lu as a summer coding project in 2011. The socketcan interface was helped immensely by Phil Dixon who wrote a leaf-socketcan driver for Linux.

The pcan interface was contributed by Albert Bloomfield in 2013. Support for pcan on Mac was added by Kristian Sloth Lauszus in 2018.

The usb2can interface was contributed by Joshua Villyard in 2015.

The IXXAT VCI interface was contributed by Giuseppe Corbelli and funded by Weightpack in 2016.

The NI-CAN and virtual interfaces plus the ASCII and BLF loggers were contributed by Christian Sandberg in 2016 and 2017. The BLF format is based on a C++ library by Toby Lorenz.

The slcan interface, ASCII listener and log logger and listener were contributed by Eduard Bröcker in 2017.

The NeoVi interface for ICS (Intrepid Control Systems) devices was contributed by Pierre-Luc Tessier Gagné in 2017.

Many improvements all over the library, cleanups, unifications as well as more comprehensive documentation and CI testing was contributed by Felix Divo in 2017 and 2018.

The CAN viewer terminal script was contributed by Kristian Sloth Lauszus in 2018.

The CANalyst-II interface was contributed by Shaoyu Meng in 2018.

Support for CAN within Python

Python natively supports the CAN protocol from version 3.3 on, if running on Linux:

Python version Feature Link
3.3 Initial SocketCAN support Docs
3.4 Broadcast Banagement (BCM) commands are natively supported Docs
3.5 CAN FD support Docs
3.7 Support for CAN ISO-TP Docs