We've rewritten portions of the slcan firmware used in the CANine adapter to use pure USB comms via libusb. The new firmware ditches the Virtual-Com-Port (VCP) cruft that is the source of many issues, not the least of which is abysmal CAN communication performance on Windows. The new firmware is known as CANine-fw and is of course open source, as is the hardware. 

Initial tests indicate that CANine-fw pushes performance compared to slcan. It is now possible to do a round-trip message in exactly 1ms, which is the polling time for USB full-speed. With slcan, this was around 1.5 - 2.0 ms for Linux ans Macos, and around 20ms for Windows!

The new firmware does come with a downside, in that now a libusb driver is needed on Windows and Macos. Nonetheless, driver installation is easy and documented.

The new firmware is currently in alpha, and installation is a bit involved. To upgrade your adapter, please follow the instructions in the documentation. To use CANine-fw you will need to upgrade to Tinymovr Studio v0.4, which means you will have to clone the github main branch and install using:

pip3 install -e .

 This version of studio points to a forked version of python-can that incorporates the correct driver for CANine fw. We plan a pull request to the main python-can repo once the changes have been thoroughly tested. 

The new firmware should be backwards compatible with CANable devices, although we did not yet perform any relevant tests.

In other news, we've created a new Github organization to better organize our robotics-related repos. Feel free to browse around!

We're already in holiday season in Greece, and this means that for a while our operations will be winding down to give us a chance for a much needed break! As such, orders placed will ship on the 13th of August. In addition, we expect new stock on all our major products by the 17th of August!

We wish you all fun and safe holidays, and see you in the next update in September!