// the take
A Python toolkit for Raspberry Pi that logs CAN bus traffic from a PiCAN2 board plus GPS data to SD card, with decoders for OBD2, Tesla, truck/bus FMS, and Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV frames. Built for car hackers and hobbyists instrumenting a vehicle for long-term data collection, not for anyone wanting a packaged telematics product.
It actually decodes several distinct CAN dialects (standard OBD2 PIDs, reverse-engineered Tesla Model S frames, FMS for commercial vehicles, and Outlander PHEV battery data) rather than just dumping raw frames - that's real protocol work, especially the Tesla and Outlander pieces which aren't documented anywhere official. It supports both passive sniffing and active querying modes, and the device can run entirely off OBD port power or be hard-wired with a DC-DC converter, which matters for something meant to sit in a car for months. There's a documented path for cloning SD cards and setting unique hostnames per device, which shows the author actually deployed this to a fleet rather than just one personal car.
Last commit was March 2021 - the setup instructions target Raspbian Stretch and pyenv-installed Python 3.6.2, which won't match any current Raspberry Pi OS image, so a new user is in for manual troubleshooting before they even get to the CAN code. The `tests/` folder is a set of manual scripts you run by hand against real hardware (can_spam.py, gps_test.py) rather than an automated suite, so there's no safety net against regressions in the PID tables. Credentials - the bluetooth streaming password and the upload API keys - go straight into plaintext YAML config files with no secrets handling. And the whole stack depends on one person's continued interest in reverse-engineering vehicle CAN protocols; with 22 forks against 158 stars there's little sign of outside contributors picking up that work if the author stops.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →