LeCroy (www.lecroy.com) has proudly released its Vehicle Bus Analyzer, a conventional oscilloscope that displays the full range of CAN protocol stack information – symbolic, electrical signal and hex. It also provides a view of additional in-circuit electrical signals (voltage levels, sensors and actuators, transients, etc.) that affect the CAN bus.

It decodes CAN serial data into Symbolic text on the oscilloscope display. The Vehicle Bus Analyzer can also decode up to four different CAN buses at one time. Specialized and standard oscilloscope tools can be used to validate and debug designs.

The instrument’s direct symbolic decoding and triggering provides fast and intuitive understanding of events. It allows users to simply load the current DBC database file into the oscilloscope and capture CAN message traffic. All protocol (hex), electrical (signal), and symbolic (application) layer information is quickly shown on the screen. Used together with standard oscilloscope, the VBA tools can locate rare events, statistically analyze and automatically measure event timing, and graph data including extracted CAN message information.

The Vehicle Bus Analyzers concentrates all information in one location. It also allows timing measurements across gateways. Time-correlated understanding of all circuit behaviors or ECU is simple, making time-consuming workarounds a thing of the past.

It can make measurements which are not possible with other instruments. Besides timing measurements, the Vehicle Bus Analyzer can extract CAN digital data from a CAN message stream, plot the data graphically as an analog signal on the oscilloscope screen, and evaluate it against other electrical signals.