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CAN bus custom message reception?

#1

Hi there,

We have a military spec UAV engine that communicates important information via a standard CAN bus (such as engine temperature).

I have looked at the UAV CAN documentation, and the CAN parameters that are configurable through MP, however it doesn’t look like it’s possible to configure the CAN bus to receive custom messages from custom addresses through MP, is someone able to confirm this?

I assume it would be possible, but would require some dev work?

I sincerely apologise if I’m missing something blatantly obvious, I feel like I’ve done my due diligence and at this point I don’t want to waste more time.

Thank you very much.

#2

It would require a fair bit of work unless it happens to be a uavcan motor (unlikely).
A CANOpen implementation has been done in a fork: https://github.com/ipmgroup/ardupilot/tree/dev/can-zero-uavcan
I haven’t read into it to see which messages, might be just esc control.
There are uav engines that talk CANOpen, but not using ArduPilot as far as I know. Of course yours might be something different again.
Once you have ArduPilot talking the particular canbus dialect you need, you need to decide the relevant messages you want at the ground station, and spit them out as mavlink. Hopefully existing mavlink messages suit what you need.

CANopen Interface compatibility
#3

Hi James,

Thank you so much for your valuable input, it’s the only answer I needed. For the time being we don’t have the resources to look into this, but it’s good to know for future reference.

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