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CANtalope CAN bus Monitor

CANtalope is a very, very crude CAN bus monitor meant to interface a PC's serial port to the CAN bus. Why bother with our own monitor? Everything else we've found is too expensive and tends to be based in Windows. We wanted a cross platform, open tool that costs less than $50/ea. So here's our answer. Note that what we'd really like is a protocol analyzer, but we can't even get close to affording that. Sigh.

CANtalope Software: The software on the PC side is a Linux-based CLI tool which allows us to translate the binary flow of information from the CANtalope boards to the PC. There's also some custom CANtalope commands.

CANtalope Hardware: The hardware is a Microchip PIC18F458 microcontroller with onboard CAN peripheral and UART. Why are we using those? Because we have a ton of them from the LV2 avionics sytem. They don't make a particularly good CAN analyzers, but they do make a decent CAN bus monitor... i.e., getting messages on and off the bus to a PC.

?CANtalope firmware: The firmware on the PICs is a custom application running under the PicCore framework.