Candle.NET

.NET wrapper for the Candle API for controlling CAN bus gateways/analysers using the Candlelight firmware (e.g. candleLight, CANable, CANtact, etc)

Instructions

• You need to copy the native candle.dll from bin\$(Platform)\$(Configuration)\candle.dll to your project's target folder so that it can be found by DllImport.

Notes for general use

• A background thread manages sending and receiving
• You don't have to worry about regularly receiving. We do that for you
• Sending and receiving are non-blocking functions
• This is only tested on Windows (10 64bit). And since the underlying driver uses WinUSB, it is unlikely to work on other platforms

Notes if you work directly with NativeFunctions

I strongly recommend that you work with Device and Channel classes rather than with the NativeFunctions. So these notes are mostly for me:

• You must periodically call candle_frame_read between your candle_frame_sends (e.g. if I perform 94 sends in a row then they start to fail, but no error is reported)
• I had issues with the device path being returned as a wchar_t* so instead we pass in a pre-allocated StringBuffer into an argument.

Example

Example apps can be found in the TestApp folder.

using System;
using System.Threading;
using Candle;

namespace TestApp
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var devices = Device.ListDevices();

            foreach (var device in devices)
            {
                device.Open();
                foreach(var keyValue in device.Channels) {
                    var channel = keyValue.Value;
                    channel.Start(500000);

                    // Send frame
                    {
                        var frame = new Frame();
                        frame.Identifier = 1 << 19;
                        frame.Extended = true;
                        frame.Data = new byte[3] { 0, 0, 0};
                        channel.Send(frame);
                    }

                    Thread.Sleep(100);

                    // Receive frames
                    var receivedFrames = channel.Receive();
                    foreach (var frame in receivedFrames)
                    {
                        Console.WriteLine(frame);
                    }

                    channel.Stop();
                }

                var errors = device.ReceiveErrors();
                foreach (var error in errors)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(error);
                }

                device.Close();
            }
        }
    }
}

Credits

Candle.NET wraps a modified version of the CandleAPIDriver found in the Cangaroo repo. The modifications are mostly to make things cleaner to wrap using the DLLImport mechanism of C#/.NET.