In order to build the CAN translator firmware from source, you need a few dependencies:
If instead of the chipKIT, you are compiling for the Blueboard (based on the NXP LPC1768/69), instead of MPIDE you will need:
The easiest way to install these dependencies is to use the script/bootstrap.sh script in the cantranslator repository. Run the script in Linux, Cygwin in Windows or OS X and if there are no errors you should be ready to go:
$ script/bootstrap.sh
If there are errors, continue reading in this section to install whatever piece failed manually.
Clone the repository from GitHub:
$ git clone https://github.com/openxc/cantranslator
Some of the library dependencies are included in this repository as git submodules, so before you go further run:
$ git submodule update --init
If this doesn’t print out anything or gives you an error, make sure you cloned this repository from GitHub with git and that you didn’t download a zip file. The zip file is missing all of the git metadata, so submodules will not work.
Building the source for the CAN translator for the chipKIT microcontroller requires MPIDE (the development environment and compiler toolchain for chipKIT provided by Digilent). Installing MPIDE can be a bit quirky on some platforms, so if you’re having trouble take a look at the installation guide for MPIDE.
Although we just installed MPIDE, building via the GUI is not supported. We use GNU Make to compile and upload code to the device. You still need to download and install MPIDE, as it contains the PIC32 compiler.
You need to set an environment variable (e.g. in $HOME/.bashrc) to let the project know where you installed MPIDE (make sure to change these defaults if your system is different!):
# Path to the extracted MPIDE folder (this is correct for OS X)
export MPIDE_DIR=/Applications/Mpide.app/Contents/Resources/Java
Remember that if you use export, the environment variables are only set in the terminal that you run the commands. If you want them active in all terminals (and you probably do), you need to add these export ... lines to the file ~/.bashrc (in Linux) or ~/.bash_profile (in OS X) and start a new terminal.
It also requires some libraries from Microchip that we are unfortunately unable to include or link to as a submodule from the source because of licensing issues:
You can read and accept Microchip’s license and download both libraries on the Digilent download page.
Once you’ve downloaded the .zip file, extract it into the libs directory in this project. It should look like this:
- /Users/me/projects/cantranslator/
---- libs/
-------- chipKITUSBDevice/
chipKitCAN/
... other libraries
If you’re using Mac OS X or Windows, make sure to install the FTDI driver that comes with the MPIDE download. The chipKIT uses a different FTDI chip than the Arduino, so even if you’ve used the Arduino before, you still need to install this driver.
$ pacman -S openocd
Install Homebrew. Then:
$ brew install libftdi libusb
$ brew install --enable-ft2232_libftdi openocd
Remove the Olimex sections from the FTDI kernel module, and then reload it:
$ sudo sed -i "" -e "/Olimex OpenOCD JTAG A/{N;N;N;N;N;N;N;N;N;N;N;N;N;N;N;N;d;}" /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext/Contents/Info.plist
$ sudo kextunload /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext/
$ sudo kextload /System/Library/Extensions/FTDIUSBSerialDriver.kext/
Download the binary version of the toolchain for your platform (Linux, OS X or Windows) from this Launchpad site.
In Arch Linux you can alternatively install the gcc-arm-none-eabi package from the AUR.