The CANBoat suite consists of small programs that you need to use together to produce a working system. It is not turnkey at all. It is meant for engineers/hobbyists that want to look at the data on their NMEA 2000 network -- either for reverse engineering, analysis, replay, testing, debugging other devices etc.

If you are a non-technical sailor who wants to use NMEA 2000 devices you are better of using one of the projects that use CANboat or its sibling CANboatJS and provide a less technical experience:

• OpenPlotter
• Signal K

All CANboat programs are command-line driven programs to work with CAN networks on BOATs.

The most common version of CAN networks on board, and in fact at the moment the only ones that this suite can analyze, are NMEA 2000 PGNs.

The NMEA 2000 database and implementation are copyrighted by the NMEA (National Marine Electronics Association). Access is restricted to members and parties that pay for it. If they do so they are not able to divulge the content of the database, thus making it impossible for open source developers to get access to it.

For this reason, we have reverse engineered the NMEA 2000 database by network observation and assembling data from public sources. Since we are reverse engineering we are also able to include company-specific PGNs from companies such as Navico, Airmar, Garmin, Raymarine and Furuno.

• Building
• Using
• Extending

NMEA 2000 / CAN interface:

• actisense-serial
• ikonvert-serial
• candump2analyzer
• analyzer
• n2kd
• n2kd_monitor
• format-message
• list-product-information

NMEA 0183:

• nmea0183-serial
• iptee