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.
@deonvdw added support for the Robotell interface in 2019.
Felix Divo and Karl Ding added type hints for the core library and many interfaces leading up to the 4.0 release.
Eric Evenchick added support for the CANtact devices in 2020.
Felix Divo added an interprocess virtual bus interface in 2020.
@jxltom added the gs_usb interface in 2020 supporting Geschwister Schneider USB/CAN devices and bytewerk.org candleLight USB CAN devices such as candlelight, canable, cantact, etc.
@jaesc added the nixnet interface in 2021 supporting NI-XNET devices from National Instruments.
Tuukka Pasanen @illuusio added the neousys interface in 2021.
Francisco Javier Burgos Maciá @fjburgos added ixxat FD support.
@domologic contributed a socketcand interface in 2021.
Felix N @felixn contributed the ETAS interface in 2021.
Felix Divo unified exception handling across every interface in the lead up to the 4.0 release.
Felix Divo prepared the python-can 4.0 release.
Support for CAN within Python¶
Python natively supports the CAN protocol from version 3.3 on, if running on Linux (with a sufficiently new kernel):
Python version |
Feature |
Link |
|---|---|---|
3.3 |
Initial SocketCAN support |
|
3.4 |
Broadcast Management (BCM) commands are natively supported |
|
3.5 |
CAN FD support |
|
3.7 |
Support for CAN ISO-TP |
|
3.9 |
Native support for joining CAN filters |