Hello!
I am (completely) new to the Arduino stuff, so I need few advices. While I have good knowledge of C/C++ programming and basic knowledge of electronics (I'm IT student), I don't know much about Arduino ... yet.
So - what I would like to create is CAN bus analyzer/sniffer. The whole idea is to connect an Arduino to CAN bus equipped car on the one side, and PC on the other. The goal is to see the CAN messages on the PC ... and maybe even send them from PC to CAN bus. Later, I would add some kind of LCD to display some parameters like engine speed, temperature ... and so on.
So - my questions are:
- Which Arduino to buy? You can assume I don't have financial limits, because as I see, all versions are very cheap (aka under 100€). Would Mega 2560 be fine?
- Which CAN-bus shield to buy? I only found two of them: http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10039 and http://www.skpang.co.uk/catalog/arduino-canbus-shield-with-usd-card-holder-p-706.html ... is there any alternative, - in any case, which one is the best?
- Communication from Arduino to PC via USB. How hard is it to implement this? How fast is it? (Is it fast enough to send CAN packets directly to PC via USB, since CAN 2.0B speed is up to 1.0Mb/s?)
- LCD screen. Which one is the easiest to manage? Can it be physically connected in parallel with CAN bus shield, since CAN bus shield is pretty big piece and covers almost whole Arduino?
That's for a start. Thanks in advance for answering my questions!