Quickstart

Simply connect your CANarchy device with a USB-C cable to your comuter to get started.

It should blink its blue onboard Led and pop up a Thumbdrive.

On the Drive you will see a folder called canarchy in there is the actual program that does all the magic.

Canarchy is written in circuitpython and comes in a human readable format so you can simply change functionality or check out how everythig works.

Now that you have it connected, it might be the perfect time to update the firmware to the latest version.

Go to the gitlab repository and download the latest release.

Once unpacked, simple copy all the contents of the .zip to your Canarchy thumbdrive volume.

You are now ready to play with canbus.

What now?

Canarchy was built with extendablity in mind.

It features 3 Inputs on the bottom and the multiswitch to navigate the menu.

Imagine you have a certain usecase.

For example you want a CANbus message to be sent on the canbus when you press Input 1.

You would typically modify the app.py file to do that.

An app.py file contains CALLBACK functions that are called from the canarchy program when there is some Event happening.

Events are: - Button Pressed - CANbus Data received - CANbus Data sent out - A periodic callback if you need to ping something frequently - A callback for the HALL sensor - ..and possibly more in the future, depending on the community feeback

Before you get started you might want to connect your canarchy board to an actual CANbus.

CANbus can be found on all kinds of vehicles.

The most common places to look for CANbus are: - Cars - E-Bikes - Electric Scooters (also those that one can rent) - Elevators - Trains - Airplanes - Helicopters - Some Drones (not the toys usually)

Make sure to connect the H port on the screwterminal to CAN_HIGH and the L port to CAN_LOW.

Also connect the - Port to GND of your target to make sure they are all on the same reference level for power.

You might also want to power canarchy directly from the Device.

To do that connect the + Port to the positive Voltage of your vehicle.

Canarchy features a pretty cool DCDC converter chip that can handle up to 72Volts of DC input to generate the 5V used internally.

The jumper on the top is used to TERMINATE the canbus with a 120 Ohm resistor.

That is needed if you are the last receiving device on the bus.

For most usecases this jumper should be removed, as you are a passive listener on an already configured bus.

Now that you have CANarchy up and running you can connect to the SERIAL device it provides for interactive bus exploration.

The simplest way is to open a Terminal and run ‘’’screen /dev/ttyACM0 115200’’’.

This will give you a Menu and show some options like display packets, send packets or replay a logfile from the SDcard.

The SDcard is handled automatically.

You can simply format a microSD card to FAT32 Filesystem and insert it into the microSD slot underneath the USB connector.

When canarchy starts, it scans the filesystem for logfiles (named 1.log..<N>.log) and it will CREATE a new logfile called <N>+1.log.

All Canbus data it sees is written into this logfile with a timestamp relative to system startup.

A logfile structure will look like this:

(TIMESTAMP) ID#DATA

(123.45) 2342#1337DEADBEEF

You can also put your own logfiles in this format on the sdcard and reply it from the Serial console or the menu.

Another thing that CANarchy can do is NATIVE CANbus support on linux using slcand

Slcand is a Serial protocol implementation run by a userland daemon on linux.

Once Slcand is up and running you have a device called /dev/slcan0

You need to initalize the device interface and et voila now you can use linux tools like cansend, candump, canreplay and all the fancy tools like SavvyCAN and wireshark.

For more in-depth documentation on how to use the software mentioned above, check out the tools section.