CANExplorer

CANBus monitoring for the modern man!

Monitor, analyse, diagnose, simulate and test CAN, CAN FD and LIN buses — on Linux, Windows and macOS, with any adapter python-can supports, or without hardware on a virtual bus.

Documentation · Quick start · Downloads · Changelog

Features

Monitoring and analysis

• Live view of any python-can interface: SocketCAN, PCAN, Vector, Kvaser, gs_usb, slcan and other serial adapters, virtual buses; CAN FD with a separate data bitrate; channel detection
• Dashboard with frame rates, bus load, error frames, bus activity, traffic breakdown and the busiest identifiers
• Trace and per-identifier overview (cycle times, changed bytes highlighted, sortable columns), display filters such as 100-1FF !123 ext rx fd, search by text, data pattern or signal condition, and bookmarks
• Millions of frames per session: older frames are paged to disk
• Bus health: error state timeline, error frames, TEC/REC and bus load over up to an hour
• Remote buses: can-server shares the interfaces of e.g. a Raspberry Pi in a vehicle over the network
• Signal plots with zoom and pan over the whole buffer, two cursors with values and statistics, several signals per chart and CSV export

Recording and replay

• ASC, BLF, CSV, candump LOG, PEAK TRC, SQLite, ASAM MF4 and gzip compressed text logs
• Splitting into numbered files by size or time, and triggered recording with conditions such as EngineData.EngineSpeed > 6000, keeping the time before and after the event
• Replay at 0.25× to 10× or as fast as possible, with pause and jumping to any position
• Replay of a recording onto a real bus, filtered and repeated
• Several buses on one timeline, and simulated gateways forwarding frames between them
• Comparison of two recordings: identifiers only in one of them, changed cycle times and payloads, and signal values, aligned by time, by a trigger identifier or by frame sequence

Signal databases

• Vector DBC, BUSMASTER DBF, AUTOSAR ARXML (including container PDUs), Kayak KCD, PCAN SYM and LIN LDF
• Database editor for CAN and LIN databases (frames, signals, nodes, encodings, schedule tables) with a bit layout view and consistency checks, and conversion between the formats

Diagnostics and protocols

• UDS over ISO-TP and the LIN transport layer: sessions, reset, data identifiers, security access with your own seed/key algorithm, DTCs, routines; CANdelaStudio CDD descriptions for named and decoded identifiers
• ECU flashing over UDS (RequestDownload/TransferData) from Intel HEX, S-record or binary files, with progress
• J1939: nodes with their address claims, DM1/DM2 trouble codes and lamps, clearing codes, requests and sending parameter groups by name with BAM or RTS/CTS
• CANopen master: NMT, SDO access to object dictionaries from EDS/DCF files, PDO mappings with live values, emergency messages
• Decoding of ISO-TP, UDS, J1939, CANopen and LIN diagnostic frames in the trace
• LIN master schedule tables

Simulation and test automation

• Simulated ECUs written in Python, controlled from QML panels
• ECU test scripts with checks, timing measurements and UDS requests; pass/fail verdicts in the Tests view or headless with can-test, with HTML, JUnit and Markdown reports for CI; parametrised test cases and requirement traceability

Workspace

• Connections, databases, filters, plots and scripts saved in one workspace file
• Dashboard-style interface with six colour themes, a command palette (Ctrl+K) and English and German texts

See the documentation for a guide to every feature.

Installation

Installers

Download the installer for your platform from the releases: a setup.exe for Windows, an AppImage or .deb for Linux and a .dmg for macOS (Apple silicon). Portable zip archives are attached as well. No Python installation is needed.

From source

With uv and Python 3.10 or newer:

git clone https://github.com/AKJ7/CANExplorer.git
cd CANExplorer
uv sync                  # Add --extra mf4 for ASAM MF4 log files (installs asammdf, numpy and pandas)
uv run canexplorer

On Linux, uv run canexplorer --install-desktop-entry adds CANExplorer with its icon to the application menu.

Interfaces

CANExplorer supports every interface of python-can 4.6. Install the vendor's driver for your adapter; the supported interfaces page lists the drivers, CAN FD support and the Linux kernel drivers.

¹ Needs Python packages that the installers do not include: run from source with uv sync --extra drivers.

Try it without hardware

Run the example ECU tests against the example engine simulation on a virtual bus:

uv run can-test examples/testing/vehicle_tests.py \
    --database examples/simulation/vehicle.dbc \
    --simulation examples/simulation/engine_simulation.py \
    --report report.html

In the application, connect to a VirtualBus, load examples/simulation/vehicle.dbc and run engine_simulation.py in the Simulation view; the quick start walks through it.

Command line

Development

uv run pytest                                  # Tests (headless Qt, python-can virtual buses)
uv run ruff check . && uv run black --check .  # Lint and formatting
uv run --group docs mkdocs serve               # Documentation preview on http://127.0.0.1:8000
uv run python packaging/build.py --archive     # Standalone bundle in dist/ (--backend nuitka to compile)
uv run python packaging/installer.py           # Installers of the platform in dist/installers

The core (can_explorer/core) is Qt-independent asyncio code; can_explorer/gui adapts it to the QML interface in can_explorer/gui/qt, and Qt and asyncio share one event loop through qasync. The development guide covers the architecture, testing, packaging and contributing.

License

MIT, as declared in pyproject.toml.