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Linux is the recommended platform for the Lely CANopen stack. While it is possible to build the stack on Windows with Visual Studio (not documented here) or Cygwin, it is generally easier to cross-compile the stack on Linux with MinGW. Instructions on how to cross-compile the stack for other (embedded) platforms can be found here.

Linux

Binary packages are available for the latest release. If you want to use an older release, or the current master branch, you need to build the stack from source.

When developing and debugging CAN(open) applications on Linux, the candump and cansend tools from can-utils will come in handy. They are available in the standard repositories of most Linux distributions.

Binary packages

Debian/Ubuntu

For Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions, binary packages can be obtained from the Lely PPA. Add the PPA to your system with

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lely/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Besides the CANopen stack, this PPA also contains the faketime tools. These tools allow a user to run a command in an environment in which all or some of the system-wide real time clocks run at a user-specified rate and with a user-specified offset. This can be particularly useful to speed up tests without having to change the timing parameters.

To install the CANopen development packages and tools, run

sudo apt-get install liblely-coapp-dev liblely-co-tools python3-dcf-tools

Additionally, you may want to install pkg-config:

sudo apt-get install pkg-config

pkg-config allows you to obtain the compiler and linker flags needed to use one of the core libraries. For example:

pkg-config --cflags liblely-coapp
pkg-config --libs liblely-coapp

Most build systems have built-in support for pkg-config.

Finally, the can-utils package contains several tools, such as candump and cansend, that may prove useful for testing and debugging. It can be installed with

sudo apt-get install can-utils

Building from source

Requirements

  • Git (check by running git --version);
  • GCC (check by running gcc -v and g++ -v) or Clang (check by running clang -v and clang++ -v);
  • Make (check by running make -v);
  • GNU Autotools: autoconf, automake and libtool (check by running autoreconf -V and libtoolize --version).

Git is not necessary if you download the source code of one of the releases.

To build the DCF tools, you need Python 3 with the setuptools and wheel modules. To run the tools, you also need the EmPy and PyYAML modules.

The optional Python bindings for the (deprecated) CAN and I/O libraries require Cython.

Under Linux, Bluetooth support in the I/O library requires the BlueZ headers (the library is not used). It is not necessary for the CANopen stack, so it can be omitted.

If you plan on using Valgrind, make sure it is installed when the stack is built. Otherwise Valgrind may complain about stack changes in code using fibers.

The configure script will look for the <valgrind/valgrind.h> header and, if it is present, insert calls to VALGRIND_STACK_REGISTER() and VALGRIND_STACK_DEREGISTER() in the fiber code to notify Valgrind about stack changes.

Finally, if you want to generate the HTML documentation of the API, make sure doxygen and Graphviz are installed.

On Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions, all dependencies (except Cython) can be installed with

sudo apt-get install \
    git build-essential automake libtool \
    python3-setuptools python3-wheel \
    python3-empy python3-yaml \
    libbluetooth-dev \
    valgrind \
    doxygen graphviz

If you want to use Clang instead of GCC, install it with

sudo apt-get install clang

Build instructions

Clone the repository with

git clone https://gitlab.com/lely_industries/lely-core.git
cd lely-core

Initialize the build system (to create the configure script):

autoreconf -i

and build environment:

mkdir -p build
cd build
../configure --disable-cython

--disable-cython disables the deprecated Python bindings.

A description of all the configuration options can be found here.

If you want to use Clang, prefix the configure command with CC=clang and CXX=clang++.

Run

make

to build the stack. If you want, you can run the test suite with

make check

This takes about a minute.

Run make check-valgrind-memcheck to run the entire test suite under valgrind. This takes considerably longer.

Finally, run

make install

to install the headers, libraries, tools and, if you installed doxygen, the HTML documentation.

By default, make install will install everything under /usr/local. You can change this directory by specifying the --prefix option to configure.

Windows

Only the Cygwin installation process is described here. While it is possible to build and use the stack with Visual Studio, we have not yet documented the process.

Click here for instructions on how to cross-compile the stack with MinGW on Linux.

Cygwin

Download the Cygwin setup program. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit version van be used.

Run setup-x86.exe or (setup-x86_64.exe) and select the git, gcc-g++, make, automake and libtool packages.

Open a Cygwin terminal and follow the build instructions.

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