CAN Message Logger

TODO

Installation

TODO

Starting the program

Run the following commands in a command prompt in the directory of this project:

1. Activate the virtual environment by running the command .\.venv\Scripts\activate (on Mac instead run source ./venv/bin/activate).
2. To start the program, run the command py .\src\main.py [data source] [flags...]; if py isn't recognized, try python or python3. Specifying the data source is a required positional argument, while flags are largely optional and can be in any order.

Data Source

User must include the data source type that will be used to set up the database. The currently available data source options are:

1. past_log: Reads in a .txt file that contains stream of CAN messages. Requires --inputFile flag.
2. mock_livelog: Simulates reading in live data from a .txt file that contains stream of CAN messages. Requires --inputFile flag.
3. livelog:
4. db: Reads in a .db or .sql file that has been generated by this program.

Flags

--inputFile: Specifies path of input file, must be followed by logfile path
--outputDB: Specifies the name of the output DB, name is autogenerated if not specified

Navigating the user interface

TODO

Overview of the Backend (for New Developers)

The backend uses a Producer-Consumer software pattern to produce CAN message entries from a given data source, and consume them into a central database SQLite file (CDB). The consumer module and various producer modules are kept in the \src\backend\input directory.

The backend also uses 2 custom objects to streamline this process:

• To handle the processing of CAN messages, the backend uses the custom CanMessage object to represent a CAN Message.
• Anytime the program wants to interact with the CDB, it needs to use a DbConnection object that represents a connection from the code to the CDB, allowing the code to query, insert, etc. into the CDB in a thread safe manner.

The backend flow of data is as follows:

1. The user includes a data source (past_log, mock_livelog, etc.) when running the program. Based on the data source's type, the corresponding function from a producer module in \src\backend\input is called in main.py and provided with the data source path / location.
2. The producer function will then process the CAN messages from the data source and push them as a tuple into queue, which is a static queue that is shared between the consumer module and the various producer modules.
3. Then a function from the consumer module will pop tuples from queue, then process the tuple and insert it into CDB.