The full documentation for socketcan can be found in the kernel docs at networking/can.txt.

The CAN network driver provides a generic interface to setup, configure and monitor CAN devices. To configure bit-timing parameters use the program ip.

The virtual CAN interfaces allow the transmission and reception of CAN frames without real CAN controller hardware. Virtual CAN network devices are usually named 'vcanX', like vcan0 vcan1 vcan2.

To create a virtual can interface using socketcan run the following:

sudo modprobe vcan
# Create a vcan network interface with a specific name
sudo ip link add dev vcan0 type vcan
sudo ip link set vcan0 up

vcan should be substituted for can and vcan0 should be substituted for can0 if you are using real hardware. Setting the bitrate can also be done at the same time, for example to enable an existing can0 interface with a bitrate of 1MB:

sudo ip link set can0 up type can bitrate 1000000

Kernels >= 3.4 supports the PCAN adapters natively via :doc:`/interfaces/socketcan`, so there is no need to install any drivers. The CAN interface can be brought like so:

sudo modprobe peak_usb
sudo modprobe peak_pci
sudo ip link set can0 up type can bitrate 500000

The can-utils library for linux includes a script cansend which is useful to send known payloads. For example to send a message on vcan0:

cansend vcan0 123#DEADBEEF

A device may enter the "bus-off" state if too many errors occurred on the CAN bus. Then no more messages are received or sent. An automatic bus-off recovery can be enabled by setting the "restart-ms" to a non-zero value, e.g.:

sudo ip link set canX type can restart-ms 100

Alternatively, the application may realize the "bus-off" condition by monitoring CAN error frames and do a restart when appropriate with the command:

ip link set canX type can restart

Note that a restart will also create a CAN error frame.

To reveal the newly created can0 or a vcan0 interface:

ifconfig

ip -details -statistics link show vcan0

To remove the network interface:

sudo ip link del vcan0

Wireshark supports socketcan and can be used to debug python-can messages. Fire it up and watch your new interface.

To spam a bus:

import time
import can

bustype = 'socketcan'
channel = 'vcan0'

def producer(id):
    """:param id: Spam the bus with messages including the data id."""
    bus = can.interface.Bus(channel=channel, bustype=bustype)
    for i in range(10):
        msg = can.Message(arbitration_id=0xc0ffee, data=[id, i, 0, 1, 3, 1, 4, 1], is_extended_id=False)
        bus.send(msg)

    time.sleep(1)

producer(10)

With debugging turned right up this looks something like this:

The process to follow bus traffic is even easier:

for message in Bus(can_interface):
    print(message)

Reading a single CAN message off of the bus is simple with the bus.recv() function:

import can

can_interface = 'vcan0'
bus = can.interface.Bus(can_interface, bustype='socketcan')
message = bus.recv()

By default, this performs a blocking read, which means bus.recv() won't return until a CAN message shows up on the socket. You can optionally perform a blocking read with a timeout like this:

message = bus.recv(1.0)  # Timeout in seconds.

if message is None:
    print('Timeout occurred, no message.')

If you set the timeout to 0.0, the read will be executed as non-blocking, which means bus.recv(0.0) will return immediately, either with a Message object or None, depending on whether data was available on the socket.

The implementation features efficient filtering of can_id's. That filtering occurs in the kernel and is much much more efficient than filtering messages in Python.

The socketcan interface implements thin wrappers to the linux broadcast manager socket api. This allows the cyclic transmission of CAN messages at given intervals. The overhead for periodic message sending is extremely low as all the heavy lifting occurs within the linux kernel.

An example that uses the send_periodic is included in python-can/examples/cyclic.py

The object returned can be used to halt, alter or cancel the periodic message task.

.. autoclass:: can.interfaces.socketcan.CyclicSendTask

.. autoclass:: can.interfaces.socketcan.SocketcanBus

   .. method:: recv(timeout=None)

      Block waiting for a message from the Bus.

      :param float timeout:
          seconds to wait for a message or None to wait indefinitely

      :rtype: can.Message or None
      :return:
          None on timeout or a :class:`can.Message` object.
      :raises can.CanError:
          if an error occurred while reading