I’ve put together pictures of the CAN bus “sniffer” project I made recently. Here is a picture of the “sniffer” hardware implementation, connected to another project that reads data from a GPS module (that small square thing in the lower right corner of the photo).

The basic idea is that the GPS interface board (the green board at the bottom of the picture) is reading data from the GPS module, doing some processing of the data, then forwarding latitude and longitude over the CAN bus to anyone who wants to listen. Someday I’m planning to implement a robot that will use that data to help navigate.

My robotics library contains the “sniffer” demo program (it uses the same hardware as the can_mcp2515 demo) as well as the code I wrote to parse the GPGGA-style sentences from a GPS module like this one.

Another thing we did on Salt Spring Island was to purchase art.

The picture is titled Somebody’s in the Kitchen and was painted by Jerry Davidson, a resident of Salt Spring. He painted it with pastels and we were very impressed with the detail he achieved with such a soft medium.

Its just delightful but my photo doesn’t quite capture the details as well as you might see in person. As you imagine, we fell in love with it as soon as we saw it. It was framed with very reflective glass so we’ll have to replace that at some point, but there isn’t any rush.

And unlike the last one, this time we actually checked to see that it would fit into the car.