Using a Mikroe CAN SPI Click 3v3 Module on a Raspberry Pi 4

Mikroelektronika (MikroE) from Serbia offers within its “Click” ecosystem numerous function modules that can be operated on microcontrollers. One of them is the “CAN SPI Click 3.3V” CAN controller module, which can be connected via the standardized “MikroBus” interface or SPI. To make the connection to a Raspberry Pi 4 work, we added the “Pi 4 Click Shield”.

In this post we will briefly explain how we got the CAN module working in conjunction with the Raspberry Pi 4.

The CAN SPI Click 3.3V module contains according to product description a MCP2515 CAN controller from Microchip. So that the chip can be recognized by its driver, the device tree must be adapted by means of an overlay. A suitable overlay is already on the Raspi stand distribution “Raspberry Pi OS”, so that the suitable overlay must be activated only.

For this the configuration file /boot/config.txt is adapted:

[all]
dtoverlay=mcp2515-can0,oscillator=10000000,interrupt=6

Important are the two parameters “oscillator” and “interrupt”:

oscillator describes the clock frequency of the clock on the CAN module. The schematic of the module reveals that it is a 10 MHz crystal - so 10,000,000 Hz must be specified here.
interrupt describes the GPIO pin of the Raspberry Pi, which transmits an interrupt signal on incoming CAN frames. The INT signal from just mentioned schematic can be traced further through the MicroBus interface to the Pi 4 Click Shield, where it is finally connected to GPIO6 of the Raspberry Pi. Therefore the value “6” has to be specified here.

Continue with the configuration of the CAN network interface. In the new file /etc/network/interfaces.d/can0 the following content is entered:

auto can0
    iface can0 can static
    bitrate 500000

This sets a bitrate of 500 kBit/s on the CAN interface and starts the interface on boot.

After a reboot of the Raspberry Pi you should see the following in the kernel messages:

pi@raspi:~ $ dmesg | grep mcp
[    8.239956] mcp251x spi0.0 can0: MCP2515 successfully initialized.

So the CAN controller has been detected successfully.

Also an ip link should now show a CAN interface with the status “UP”:

pi@raspi:~ $ ip link
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: eth0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether e4:5f:01:af:96:bc brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
3: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST> mtu 1500 qdisc noop state DOWN mode DORMANT group default qlen 1000
    link/ether e4:5f:01:af:96:bd brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
4: can0: <NOARP,UP,LOWER_UP,ECHO> mtu 16 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP mode DEFAULT group default qlen 10
    link/can

To test the function we can make use of the can-utils and send a message to the Raspi itself via CAN:

sudo apt install can-utils

In an SSH session the candump command is started to show all incoming CAN messages:

sudo candump can0

In another SSH session, test data is sent via cansend:

sudo cansend 123#FEFE

If the message just sent is also visible in the candump window, the CAN bus is working properly.

Sources:

By Thomas Leister

2023-06-20

https://blog.zero-iee.com/en/posts/mikroe-can-shield-on-raspberry-pi/ Thomas Leister