CANgaroo

Open-source CAN bus analyzer for Linux 🐧 / Windows 🪟

🔩 Supported Interfaces & Hardware:

• PEAK-System (PCAN):
  • PCAN-USB, PCAN-USB Pro, PCAN-PCIe, etc. (Native driver: peak_usb).
• Native USB-CAN Adapters:
  • CANable (with Candlelight firmware)
  • Kvaser USB/CAN Leaf
  • Candlelight compatible devices (e.g., MKS CANable, cantact)
• USB SLCAN Adapters:
  • CANable (with set-default SLCAN firmware)
  • Arduino-based CAN shields (running SLCAN sketches)
• Industrial / Embedded CAN:
  • PCIe/mPCIe CAN cards
  • Embedded CAN controllers on SoCs (e.g., Raspberry Pi with MCP2515)
• Remote / Network CAN:
  • CANblaster (UDP)
  • tcpcan / candlelight-over-ethernet
• GrIP Driver

⚙️ Features

• Real-time CAN/CAN-FD Decoding: Support for standard and high-speed flexible data-rate frames.
• Wide Hardware Compatibility: Works with SocketCAN (Linux), CANable (SLCAN), Candlelight, and CANblaster (UDP).
• DBC Database Support: Load multiple .dbc files to instantly decode frames into human-readable signals.
• Powerful Data Visualization: Integrated Graphing tools supporting Time-series, Scatter charts, Text-based monitoring, and interactive Gauge views with zoom and live tooltips.
• Advanced Filtering & Logging: Isolate critical data with live filters and export captures for offline analysis.
• Modern Workspace: A clean, dockable userinterface optimized for multi-monitor setups.

Languages

• 🇩🇪 German
• 🇺🇸 English
• 🇪🇸 Spain
• 🇨🇳 Chinese

🛠️ Building

🐧 Linux

Distribution	Command
Ubuntu / Debian	sudo apt install qt6-base-dev qt6-base-private-dev qt6-tools-dev libqt6charts6-dev libqt6serialport6-dev build-essential libnl-3-dev libnl-route-3-dev libgl1-mesa-dev
Fedora	sudo dnf install qt6-qtbase-devel qt6-qtcharts-devel qt6-qtserialport-devel libnl3-devel
Arch Linux	sudo pacman -S qt6-base qt6-charts qt6-serialport libnl

Build with:

• qmake6
• make
• make install

🪟 Windows

• Qt Creator (Community Version is okay) brings everything you need
• except for the PCAN libraries.
  • Get them from http://www.peak-system.com/fileadmin/media/files/pcan-basic.zip
  • Extract to .zip to src/driver/PeakCanDriver/pcan-basic-api
  • Make sure PCANBasic.dll (the one from pcan-basic-api/Win32 on a "normal" 32bit Windows build) is found when running cangaroo, e.g. by putting it in the same folder as the .exe file.
• if you don't want Peak support, you can just disable the driver: remove the line "win32:include($$PWD/driver/PeakCanDriver/PeakCanDriver.pri)" from src/src.pro
• if you want to deploy the cangaroo app, make sure to also include the needed Qt Libraries. for a normal release build, these are: Qt5Core.dll Qt5Gui.dll Qt5Widgets.dll Qt5Xml.dll

ARXML to DBC Conversion

Cangaroo natively supports DBC. If you have ARXML files, you can convert them using canconvert:

# Install canconvert
pip install canconvert

# Convert ARXML to DBC
canconvert TCU.arxml TCU.dbc

📥 Download

Download the latest release from the Releases.

📜 Credits

Written by Hubert Denkmair hubert@denkmair.de

Further development by:

• Ethan Zonca e@ethanzonca.com
• WeAct Studio
• Schildkroet (https://github.com/Schildkroet/CANgaroo)
• Wikilift (https://github.com/wikilift/CANgaroo)
• Jayachandran Dharuman (https://github.com/OpenAutoDiagLabs/cangaroo)