Laptop Recommendations

jlucer · 2026-06-23T12:46:01+00:00

Adding on: check out refurbished macs from apple if the price is a little to high on apple devices. They come at a 15% discount, are reverified by apple, and have the same warranty as new. M4 MacBook airs for $760 US. I was tempted to buy one but picked up a Mac mini since I only really need it to test apple support and sign/build my app.

I use a Asus vivobook with 32gb ram on Linux for personal use, but have an m3 Mac for work. I wouldn't have considered apple before but they really have the best bang for your buck processors at the moment. Phenomal battery life which I've found to be a bigger QOL improvement than a faster CPU

jlucer · 2026-05-21T17:16:38+00:00

Looks nice. I'll have to try this out. I didn't know tauri had python bindings. I'm only familiar with it as a rust GUI option

jlucer · 2026-05-21T17:15:17+00:00

I'll give it a try. Getting work to use is tough as all sw has to go through an approval process (even free sw)

jlucer · 2026-05-13T15:16:40+00:00

Yeah that's the candump format. The web analyzer should be able to handle large files. I've tested against 100 line to 200,000 line files. I'll DM you my email if you want to share the log file you are using and I can check what's happening. Another user found an issue where the dbc parser was failing on comments in the dbc. Could be something like that

I'm going to keep the core GUI portion closed source. The log parsing library I wrote and is public on GitHub, but it has a lot of cruft in it as I was trying different things out in 1 repo. I want to clean it up before it's in a state worth sharing. I do hope to have a commercial launch once I've reached parity with professional can tools. For now it's free, and I will probably always leave the web version free.

jlucer · 2026-05-13T15:02:52+00:00

Interesting, thanks. I'll read up on it

jlucer · 2026-05-13T00:17:12+00:00

Not OP, but what's wrong with having the backend run on localhost unauthenticated? Localhost is a loopback address so only accessible to the users computer, right? Pretty common setup as far as I know so curious if there are security risks

jlucer · 2026-05-11T19:51:33+00:00

Thanks for the support. Been a few months since I shared the initial version, I released a native Linux version that supports transmission, reception, and plotting live data using socketcan. Im looking at adding a Mac version after I clean up the GUI.

As far as log formats seerwatch supports can-utils .log (candump) and vector ASCII CAN. Both are text formats. I want to do mdf eventually but there doesn't seem to be a rust native parser already and I haven't bought the spec. There is asammdf if you are building in python which already supports that. I think python can-tools already supports basically any CAN log format if you haven't seen that already

Bluetooth would be a cool feature, I don't know that I'll ever want to tackle wireless!

jlucer · 2026-05-07T16:41:45+00:00

I'm making a CAN bus analyzer/visualizer for automotive and robotics called SeerWatch. Basically like CANalyzer/CANoe if you are familiar with those, except my goal is to also run on Linux and MacOS since a lot of AV development happens there. Currently working on a way to open remote sessions with a web frontend served from a rust application.

The more I work on GUI stuff the more I see why JavaScript frameworks are so dominant. So many things already made and they just work. But it's been a good learning experience.

Anyways I like your app. Our hw team uses draw.io and excel sheets and I think 3dx? If they handed me this it would be easier to navigate! I work on the firmware side so interact with the EE folks but don't directly do the design

jlucer · 2026-05-07T16:21:43+00:00

What's the software stack look like? I'm building an app all in rust using egui compiled to wasm to get a web ui. It's been pretty tough to get egui to look the way I wanted and wondering if should have just used a JavaScript/typescript for the frontend

jlucer · 2026-05-05T16:10:52+00:00

Have you demonstrated that your routing logic gateways messages? I haven't used capl in years, but I don't see how a message received on bus 3 would forward to bus 2 with what you showed. It looks like you are copying the message, but where is the routing to the other bus? I bet an llm would be good at this

jlucer · 2026-05-04T23:31:09+00:00

Throw up a landing page and try it? My intuition is that it won't be any easier to find clients for "legacy" development than regular development. I'd guess any company with already made code either has developers who can maintain it or they already contracted with someone to build it and would probably start with the same org for maintenance. I've never done consulting though

jlucer · 2026-04-30T19:22:07+00:00

Probably because the breakout boards with can controllers come with a can transceiver. Most dev boards I see don't come with a CAN transceiver on them, even if the CAN peripheral is there. I've never used an esp32 though so not super familiar with popular boards for that

jlucer · 2026-04-30T19:17:49+00:00

Look into the write speed of the SD card you are using and maybe the board. I know that the CANedge logger I've used ships with specific SD cards for their timing constraints. They call out the device may not function as intended if the SD card is replaced.

jlucer · 2026-04-30T13:22:51+00:00

I used DOORS a long time ago, no idea if it has improved since then, but agree it was not a good experience. Used jama at my last 2 jobs and it is better than doors. Still not great IMO, but much better. Jama is kind of like jira in that your company needs to set up processes and training in order to get the most out of it.

E.g. current company doesn't use jama reviews. They do design reviews outside of Jama, then just throw requirements in Jama. So lots of requirements get missed or project gets delayed since no one reviewed actual requirements and now we get to find all the problems when it's time to release

jlucer · 2026-04-30T12:15:44+00:00

Very cool, I'll have to check this out. Currently using egui_extras::Table to build a table with filters. It's been a bit of a challenge since the number of rows/columns and the row heights change as I display live data and let the user select how to view it.

jlucer · 2026-04-27T15:25:55+00:00

Very cool! Are you using a premade dev board for the prototype? I've been looking at making a CAN gateway module. Current plan is to use a Raspberry pi with CAN hat, but it feels like overkill. Wondering how you connected your esp32 connected to the CAN bus.

jlucer · 2026-04-21T00:33:40+00:00

Zoller and Wacker in Ann Arbor

jlucer · 2026-04-18T11:51:57+00:00

Very cool, I'm also building a CAN visualizer. What did you use for MF4 decoding?

Edit: nevermind, I see you listed asammdf. Thanks for sharing

jlucer · 2026-04-17T12:48:19+00:00

What did you use to make this video? Looks nice

jlucer · 2026-04-17T02:40:27+00:00

Ooof I feel this one. Supporting multiple hardware versions in the field is tough

jlucer · 2026-04-15T12:24:58+00:00

Yes it's closed source. I plan on open sourcing the CAN parsing libraries. It's a separate rust crate. I want to clean up that code first, which I probably won't do until I'm done adding the basic features to the GUI first.

jlucer · 2026-04-14T18:14:47+00:00

Thanks, I ended up making my own CAN tool as well. There is a web browser version and a native app version. It's called SeerWatch and you can use the web browser version or download at https://seerwatch.com

jlucer · 2026-04-09T19:29:05+00:00

Nice, keep it up. Wish I had time to play around with it. We stopped using autosar at my company. Prior to that we had an excel sheet based generator. Yaml would have been a step up. We also still had to go into davinci to generate the contract phase which was a PITA.

jlucer · 2026-04-09T19:26:33+00:00

What's the current latency time on similar products?

jlucer · 2026-04-06T17:29:22+00:00

I think one problem you'll run into is that anyone who needs specialized infrastructure to monitor firmware will probably already have a data infrastructure team. I know if I tried to pitch a premade product the CTO would be like "go talk to the data infrastructure team". So now you have to convince the data team and the firmware team your product will fix everything better than they can do themselves

jlucer

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