After realising how few options there were, according to Scythe, the company felt forced to create the programme.
The first open source project from Scythe Robotics, CANfetti, aims to simplify the process of adding new parts to autonomous lawn mowers. The Controller Area Network, or CAN bus, based communication protocol CANOpen is implemented by CANfetti.
The “backbone” of Scythe Robotics’ autonomous mower, the M.52, is a CAN bus made for the automotive industry. The business said that other open source CAN frameworks were “too restricting” and that this led them to build CANfentti.
It gave the motor controllers as an illustration. The business had trouble getting pre-existing CANopen stacks to function properly with the M.52. However, the company claimed that by using CANfetti, it was able to “integrate these and other crucial components into M.52, yielding significantly improved machine performance.”
Scythe unveiled a number of new features intended to simplify development. The use of dynamic Object Dictionary types “ranging from std::string to an index assignable callback” is one of them. This enables “complete control over the reading and writing of an entry at the byte level,” according to the document.
“Given the complex communication needs across the range of specialized components in Scythe M.52, we knew we’d have to leverage a higher-level CAN protocol,” says Matt Quick, lead firmware engineer at Scythe, in a statement. “A number of our vendors already support CANopen, making it a great fit for us. But as advantageous as CANopen is, the available open source libraries were frankly a headache to integrate and had severe functional limitations, so we built our own solution.”
The business continued, “provides engineers with a drop-in CANopen stack that doesn’t get in the way and simply lets them build their system around it,” adding that its API is more versatile than most.
To build for a variety of sectors, CANfetti can be utilised on a number of platforms. Railway logistics and maritime electronics were highlighted by Scythe.
