Kvaser ROS Interface API

This package was developed as a standardized way to access Kvaser CAN devices from ROS. It can either be used as a development API by including the header <kvaser_interface/kvaser_interface.h> and linking against libros_linuxcan.so or the stand-alone node kvaser_can_bridge can communicate with a CAN device independently.

Installation

The kvaser_interface package depends on the Kvaser CANLIB API. You can install the Kvaser CANLIB from source directly from Kvaser, however the easiest way to install is using our ppa which distributes them as deb packages:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:astuff/kvaser-linux
sudo apt update
sudo apt install kvaser-canlib-dev kvaser-drivers-dkms

Now that the dependencies are installed, we can install kvaser_interface:

sudo apt install apt-transport-https
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [trusted=yes] https://s3.amazonaws.com/autonomoustuff-repo/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/autonomoustuff-public.list'
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-kvaser-interface

The kvaser_can_bridge Node

TOPICS

can_tx [can_msgs::Frame]

This topic is published by the node. It expects to have other nodes subscribe to it to receive data which are sent by the CAN device.

can_rx [can_msgs::Frame]

This topic is subscribed to by the node. It expects to have data published to it which are intended to be received by the CAN device.

PARAMETERS

~can_hardware_id

This is the Kvaser Hardware ID (serial number) of the connected device.

~can_circuit_id

This is the 0-based index of the channel number on the specific hardware device designated by the ~can_hardware_id.

~can_bit_rate

This is the communication rate to be used on the CAN channel in bits per second (default: 500000).

TOOLS

list_channels

A simple tool with no ROS dependencies which returns a list of all Kvaser devices and channels available on those devices.

canmonitor

A simple tool with no ROS depedencies to output the CAN messages received on a given channel index (-i - default: 0) and bitrate (-b - default: 500000) to the terminal.