In recent years, CAN-based applications have demonstrated high degree of security and stability. More and more researches and developments of CAN-based devices have been published from the automotive and industrial domains. More and more system integrators think how to reduce the development time and reuse the control programs. The virtual CAN driver would help to reduce the development time when developing new applications. The virtual CAN driver is an integrated library and provides common API functions for all CAN converters and CAN PCI boards. When developing applications, the users need not to be familiar with the hardware-specific commands. It can simultaneously access the CAN devices with different hardware interfaces. It would help to reuse the same CAN communication programs.
After applying the virtual CAN driver, all of the CAN products connected with the PC will be regarded as the virtual CAN bus ports of the PC. The virtual CAN driver would collect all the CAN devices connected with the PC such as Ethernet, RS-232, USB, PCI bus and PCI Express bus. And the virtual CAN driver gives each CAN port a unique sequence number which is a virtual CAN port number. Users only need to know the mapping table of the CAN devices and virtual CAN ports.
The virtual CAN ports can be accessed by the APIs of the virtual CAN driver. No matter what kinds of the hardware interfaces the CAN products have, each application can apply the same APIs to access the CAN network. Therefore, it is helpful to develop the control system with different CAN products, or to transfer the hardware interface of the applications.
Assorted with the free graphical tool (VxCAN Viewer), users can easily manage and integrate with CAN converters and CAN PCI boards. VxCAN Viewer provides various functionalities to transmit the CAN messages and monitor the received CAN message. When planning or developing CAN application, VxCAN Viewer would help users to diagnosis the CAN bus and CAN products.
|
