drivers/canopen_master - A CANOpen master protocol implementation

This library provides the protocol layer necessary to implement a CANopen master. Its aim is to really only provide the interpretation to/from CAN messages and the necessary tooling to handle an object dictionary and a node state.

Its focus is on the CANopen predefined communication set, as it turns out to be used by most CANopen devices.

It is unlike other open-source implementations (as e.g. CAN festival) as its aim is not to provide a full integration stack where the driver is stored deep inside, but rather a "inside-out" protocol library. The application is meant to interface with the CAN hardware, using this library as a mean to interpret the CAN stream. This makes is a much better target for integration in different "active" frameworks such as Rock

High-level Slave API

The main entry point to create specific device drivers is the Slave class. This class provides a higher-level API on top of the basic CANOpen state machine and object dictionary.

The general process is to

1. declare objects. They are represented as C++ types.
2. create a high-level API specific to your device that interacts with the object dictionary and/or the remote device

All messages received from the device should be passed to Slave::process so that the information they contain is saved in the object dictionary. The value returned by process allows you to query what was received, and act accordingly.

Integration

Methods in Slave that interact with the remote device return vectors of canbus::Message. These messages are meant to be sent and acked one-by-one. They are all SDO messages. The general process is:

auto messages = slave.querySomething();
for (auto msg : messages) {
    device_driver.write(msg);
    do {
        // Wait for SDO ack message
    } while (slave.process(received_can_message).isAck());
}

The Slave::process method should be fed every message that is being received from the CAN bus. It will ignore messages that are not meant for the device it represents, but will process the rest and update the object dictionary accordingly.

Interacting with the object dictionary

The Slave class maintains a representation of the "best known" state of the device's object dictionary. Two methods, setRaw and getRaw allow to access this local view to the dictionary.

In addition, the class allows to interact with the remote device by querying for a download/upload. Whenever a SDO download reply message is passed to Slave::process, the object dictionary will be updated. This also happens with PDOs (see next section).

Create an Objects.hpp file where you will define your custom objects using the CANOPEN_DEFINE_OBJECT macro, as e.g.:

CANOPEN_DEFINE_RO_OBJECT(OBJECT_ID, OBJECT_SUB_ID, Name, Type)
CANOPEN_DEFINE_WO_OBJECT(OBJECT_ID, OBJECT_SUB_ID, Name, Type)
CANOPEN_DEFINE_RW_OBJECT(OBJECT_ID, OBJECT_SUB_ID, Name, Type)

Name is the name you will use afterwards to access the object, Type is the data type inside the CANOpen dictionary itself. The slave class allows you to access the local object dictionary - that is the currently known values for objects in the dictionary - with

getRaw<Name>()
setRaw<Name>(Type type);

and get the SDO messages necessary to download/upload objects with

queryUpload<Name>();
queryDownloadRaw<Name>(Type type);

In addition, one can download the value currently stored in the local object dictionary with

queryDownload<Name>();

PDOs

Slave provides a way to setup PDOs and handle them relatively transparently.

First, one has to create a PDO mapping using the PDOMapping class:

PDOMapping pdo;
pdo.add<Voltage>();
pdo.add<Current>();

From there, call m_can_open.configurePDO to get the SDO messages that will set up the PDO. Call either m_can_open.declareRPDOMapping or m_can_open.declareTPDOMapping to let the object know the mapping between PDOs and objects in the dictionary. It will ensure that:

• you can build the RPDOs using getRPDOMessage and send them on the bus
• Slave::process automatically updates the object dictionary when it receives a TPDO message.