James Steward of In Chip Design P/L, has submitted a CAN serial driver and associated CAN virtual hub, for *nix operating systems using CanFestival.

The CAN serial driver alone, is only useful to connect two nodes.  The hub is an application that provides a virtual CAN hub for up to 16 nodes, and possible connection to a CAN network, via a CAN Festival driver (serial driver has support, can4Linux support coming soon).

The reason this was developed, was two fold.  Firstly to allow testing of a network of CAN devices running as applications on a GNU/Linux OS, and secondly so that several sensors with more I/O than can be handled by a single DS 401 slave, could be run as many slave nodes in one GNU/Linux machine, with connection to a real CAN network as well.

The hub uses pseudo TTYs and no IP sockets.  This is to reduce overhead and size for embedded Linux devices.