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Getting Started

A two-minute walkthrough of everything on this page and the rest of the User Guide, using the synthetic source so you can follow along with no hardware. Open it full page for chapters and a transcript.

Prerequisites

  • Wireshark installed. CANtrip doesn't capture CAN traffic itself, it reuses Wireshark's own capture pipeline (tshark/dumpcap) - see Architecture: Overview for why. Npcap is not required; it only gates normal network-interface capture, not the extcap-based capture CANtrip uses.
  • A driver package for whichever CAN hardware you're using (PEAK's PCAN-Basic, Vector's XL Driver Library, etc.). If you don't have any yet, you don't need one to try CANtrip, it ships with a synthetic CAN source.

Installing

Prebuilt binaries are published under Releases.

  1. Download and extract the zip anywhere.
  2. Copy can2pcap.exe (sitting right next to cantrip.exe in the extracted folder) into Wireshark's personal extcap folder:
copy can2pcap.exe "$env:APPDATA\Wireshark\extcap\"

This is a manual, one-time step per install, and it's the single most common source of "it's not working" - see Troubleshooting: the extcap deploy trap if you ever rebuild or update CANtrip and things stop reflecting new behavior.

  1. Launch cantrip.exe.

Building from source instead is documented in the repository's README.

The ribbon

CANtrip's menu is a ribbon: each tab across the top shows a different group of controls, and Start/Stop capture is pinned to the tab bar's own corner so it's reachable no matter which tab is open.

CANtrip's ribbon tabs

  • Home - capture display mode, display rate, and Rune save/load. See Home Tab.
  • Hardware - pick a channel, configure bus timing. See Hardware Tab.
  • Analysis & Measurement - DBC import, Trace/Graph view. See Analysis & Measurement Tab.
  • Logging - record traffic to a file, or replay a recording. See Logging Tab.
  • Stimulation - configure and transmit CAN messages. See Stimulation Tab.
  • About - version info and license. See About Tab.

Try it with no hardware at all

Every install of CANtrip always lists a "CANtrip synthetic test source (no hardware needed)" channel, regardless of what real CAN adapters are plugged in. It fakes traffic: fixed-ID frames, smoothly time-varying waveform signals (good for trying the Graph view), and periodic synthetic bus errors, so every feature described in this guide can be tried without owning a single CAN cable.

Network hardware dropdown

Pair it with test/sample.dbc from the repository, a small DBC whose four message IDs (0x100, 0x200, 0x300, 0x7E8) deliberately match what the synthetic source transmits, so imported signals decode immediately with zero hardware. Import it from the Analysis & Measurement tab.

Next steps

Walk through the tabs in order: Home → Hardware → Analysis & Measurement → Logging → Stimulation. Once your setup is how you like it, save it as a Rune so you don't have to redo it next time.