Packetlogger documentation: ASCII raw format explained

In this post we'll go into the format produced by the reader programs and consumed by the analyzer program. Here's a typical example of some typical PGNs that have 8 bytes of data:

2011-11-24-22:42:04.388,2,127251,36,255,8,7d,0b,7d,02,00,ff,ff,ff
2011-11-24-22:42:04.390,2,127250,36,255,8,00,5a,7c,00,00,00,00,fd
2011-11-24-22:42:04.437,2,130306,36,255,8,b1,5c,00,ee,f0,fa,ff,ff
2011-11-24-22:42:04.490,2,127251,36,255,8,7e,0b,7d,02,00,ff,ff,ff
2011-11-24-22:42:04.493,2,127250,36,255,8,01,5a,7c,00,00,00,00,fd

8 bytes is the usual amount because that can be transmitted in a single CAN message. Longer messages are transmitted in multiple CAN messages. The reader programs 'solve' this and only send out coalesced complete PGN messages, for example:

2011-11-24-22:41:10.034,6,129540,36,255,123,24,ff,0a,03,68,03,a2,0d,00,00,ff,ff,ff,7f,f1,05,44,2a,c2,9a,04,10,ff,ff,ff,7f,f2,07,dc,17,e7,28,04,10,ff,ff,ff,7f,f2,08,0a,2f,0a,2f,e4,0c,ff,ff,ff,7f,f2,0a,f4,0c,c3,6d,68,10,ff,ff,ff,7f,f2,0f,f4,0c,9e,c1,10,0e,ff,ff,ff,7f,f2,13,68,03,16,22,00,00,ff,ff,ff,7f,f1,15,7f,07,ef,de,48,0d,ff,ff,ff,7f,f2,1a,dc,26,fb,c2,a0,0f,ff,ff,ff,7f,f2,1c,2e,17,2c,62,10,0e,ff,ff,ff,7f,f2

So what is this format?


The format is a very strict and simple ASCII representation of the binary CAN data. It contains the data in a format that is easy to parse by further programs. It is also still somewhat readable, unlike the CAN binary messages.
It contains one PGN per line, and consists of a fixed set of 6 fields that are always the same, followed by a variable number of data fields. The first fields are:

Number	Field
1	Timestamp when the message was received
2	Priority of the message
3	PRN, the identifier that explains what type of message it is
4	Source ID of the device that produced the message
5	Destination ID, 255 means broadcast
6	Number of data bytes to follow
7 ... n	Data bytes in hexadecimal format