socketcand

Socketcand is a daemon that provides access to CAN interfaces on a machine via a network interface. The communication protocol uses a TCP/IP connection and a specific protocol to transfer CAN frames and control commands. The protocol specification can be found in ./doc/protocol.md.

Installation

To build and run socketcand make sure you have the following tools installed:

• meson
• gcc or another C compiler
• a kernel that includes the SocketCAN modules
• the headers for your kernel version
• the libconfig with headers (libconfig-dev under debian based systems)
• the libsocketcan with headers (libsocketcan-dev under debian based systems) is a requirement to configure the interfaces from socketcand

Execute the following commands to configure, build, and install the software:

$ meson setup -Dlibconfig=true --buildtype=release build
$ meson compile -C build
$ meson install -C build

Service discovery

The daemon uses a simple UDP beacon mechanism for service discovery. A beacon containing the service name, type and address is sent to the broadcast address (port 42000) at minimum every 3 seconds. A client only has to listen for messages of this type to detect all SocketCAN daemons in the local network.

Usage

 socketcand [-v | --verbose] [-i interfaces | --interfaces interfaces]
	[-p port | --port port] [-l interface | --listen interface]
	[-u name | --afuxname name] [-n | --no-beacon] [-d | --daemon]
	[-e error_mask | --error-mask error_mask]
	[-h | --help]

Description of the options

• -v (activates verbose output to STDOUT)
• -i interfaces (comma separated list of CAN interfaces the daemon shall provide access to e.g. '-i can0,vcan1' - default: vcan0)
• -p port (changes the default port '29536' the daemon is listening at)
• -l interface (changes the default network interface the daemon will bind to - default: eth0)
• -u name (the AF_UNIX socket path - an abstract name is used when the leading '/' is missing. N.B. the AF_UNIX binding will supersede the port/interface settings)
• -n (deactivates the discovery beacon)
• -e error_mask (enable CAN error frames in raw mode providing an hexadecimal error mask, e.g: 0x1FFFFFFF)
• -d (set this flag if you want log to syslog instead of STDOUT)
• -h (prints this message)

License

The source code is released under either GPL-2.0-only or BSD-3-Clause licenses.