This is an old revision of the document!
Table of Contents
CAN Interfaces
USB CAN adapters can show as follows on Linux.
Serial Line CAN
A serial port appears. slcand can talk to it.
SocketCAN
A can network device appears. e.g. can0, shown by ifconfig.
Set bitrate for NMEA2000 and bring up CAN interface:
ip link set can0 up type can bitrate 250000
It seems SignalK doesn't do this itself.
Analysers
Canboat
Install Linux SocketCAN tools:
sudo apt install can-utils
Configure SocketCAN interface:
ip link set can0 up type can bitrate 250000
Use canboat analyzer tool:
candump can0 | candump2analyzer | analyzer
Wireshark
Can open SocketCAN interfaces, like can0. Select Analyze → Decode As, and in the last column of the table you can click to set it to J1939. This will decode as far as giving you PGNs. I didn't find an NMEA2000 decoder, but this at least tells you data is flowing.
Hardware
CANable
CANable is a USB - CAN interface using an STM32F072. CANable firmware does slcan. The same device can be flashed with candleLight firmware which does Linux native / SocketCAN. I bought a device from Aliexpress which came with candleLight.