Con­ver­ting CAN­touch Trace Files

Soo­ner or later, anyo­ne using the pro­to­col moni­tor of CAN­touch will won­der how to con­vert the bina­ry trace files (.trc) into rea­da­ble data.
Sin­ce CAN­vi­si­on ver­si­on 1.28 this is easi­ly pos­si­ble with the tri­al mode. The soft­ware can import the files and export them to a CSV file. In addi­ti­on, the data con­tent can be decoded if the recor­ding is CANopen or J1939 data.

The tri­al mode is a ver­si­on of the pro­gram limi­t­ed to five minu­tes run­time. Saving files is not pos­si­ble, but all other func­tions are usable exact­ly as in the full ver­si­on, thus also the export as CSV file.

This is how the trace file is impor­ted and then expor­ted to a CSV file:

1. Start­ing the software
2. Open the cor­re­spon­ding cli­ent win­dow (CAN recei­ve, CANopen recei­ve or SAE J1939 receive)
3. File > Import > CAN­touch Trace… Sel­ec­tion of the file
4. The file is impor­ted and decoded if possible.
5. File > Export > CSV file… Name the file
6. File is exported

When import­ing the CSV file into a cal­cu­la­ti­on soft­ware, sel­ect the semi­co­lon as the separator.

Con­ver­ting CAN­touch recei­ve list

The pro­ce­du­re for the recei­ve list of the CAN­touch pro­to­col moni­tor is simi­lar. Plea­se note that a maxi­mum of 200 lines is stored in this file.

1. Start­ing the software
2. Open the cli­ent win­dow CAN Receive
3. File > Import > CAN­touch Recei­ve List… Sel­ec­tion of the file (cantouch.document.app.canmonitor.receive.xml)
4. The file is impor­ted and decoded if possible.
5. File > Export > CSV file… Name the file
6. File is exported

Limi­ting the num­ber of messages

The CAN­vi­si­on cli­ent win­dows can dis­play a maxi­mum num­ber of one mil­li­on tele­grams. If your recor­ding is lar­ger or deco­ding is not nee­ded, you can con­vert it using the com­mand line tool trc2csv.exe. In this case, deco­ding with CAN­vi­si­on is not pos­si­ble even afterwards.

It is easy to use:

1. put the file trc2csv.exe on your desktop
2. drag-and-drop the CAN­touch-trc file to be con­ver­ted from the Explo­rer onto the icon of the file trc2csv.exe
3. the file is read, decoded and stored under the same name in the same fol­der with the exten­si­on csv
4. import the CSV file e.g. into Excel or ano­ther spreadsheet for fur­ther processing

Alter­na­tively, it can also be used on the com­mand line (“Com­mand Prompt”).

Down­load trc2csv.exe

trc2csv.exe   18-10-2018