The content of this third part will be a description of automatic dictionaries, these are dictionaries for CAN Open and SAE J1939 protocols, which are probably the most widespread protocols you can encounter in the world of CAN.
We will start with the SAE J1939 protocol. Setup is easy, just select the SAE J1939 dictionary in Options - marked in red in the picture. Furthermore, we have the option to specify the Industry group choice (green marking). In order for source addresses from value 128 upwards to be correctly named, this parameter needs to be set correctly. The standard specifies these groups according to usage:
- 0 - Global, applies to all
- 1 - On-Highway Equipment
- 2 - Agricultural and Forestry Equipment
- 3 - Construction Equipment
- 4 - Marine
- 5 - Industrial-Process Control-Stationary (Gen-Sets)
- 6 - Reserved for future assignment by SAE
- 7 - Reserved for future assignment by SAE
Subsequently, the messages in the log of received, sent messages, Grid log, Data view tool, and similar are named by this dictionary as shown in the following image.
The naming displays quite a lot of information: the page, message type (peer to peer, broadcast), naming, source address, and, in the case of peer-to-peer messages, the destination address. If we want to shorten the naming for clarity, it is possible to turn on the J1939-short mode option (marked in blue in the first image). Then the naming is shortened to just the actual name of the message, with no additional information displayed. The result is shown in the following image.
Note: The image also shows part of the Data view window. If we want to display individual values contained in the data in this tool, it is necessary to use a DBC file or an EYE file in this tool. In this case, we will get even more detailed information - as shown in the next image. However, we will get to this in later parts of the series. Here we are only illustrating other available options.
There is nothing more to add about setting up the dictionary for SAE J1939, and we will move on to the dictionary for the CAN open protocol. Since this dictionary does not name messages only according to which category they belong to (NMT, SDO, PDO, etc.), but can name SDO messages in more detail (takes into account the so-called index and subindex), this dictionary requires configuration according to the system you are currently working on. That is, to configure for each device (node) what device profile it is in the system to which you are connected.
In the Options settings, it is necessary to select the CAN open dictionary (marked in red in the previous image) and configure the profiles. Profile configuration is done in the window that opens after clicking on the Node profiles button. For each node, it is possible to set two profiles here. The reason is the ability to define, for example, specific parameters of some manufacturers that are not part of standard profiles as a second profile. In this case, it is possible to edit the configuration files for CAN open in the PP2CAN program as described in this article.
The result of the naming can then be seen in the last image. This concludes our section on dictionaries; the next part will focus on how to display data stored in CAN messages.
