ECU Emulator

The goal of this is to create a virtual ECU, which emulates basic features of our ECU firmware. This should help us in developing the rest of the software stack (LLServer, ECUI).

Note: This is still very much experimental and a work in progress.

Setup

Native (no Docker)

Add a virtual SocketCAN interface:

sudo modprobe vcan
sudo ip link add dev vcan0 type vcan
sudo ip link set up vcan0

Docker / Docker Compose

The container does not create or manage any CAN interfaces. You must provide a SocketCAN interface from the outside (e.g. create vcan0 on the host).

If you want the container to use a host vcan0, run it in the host network namespace.

Docker build + run (host networking)

docker build -t ecuemulator .

# create vcan0 on the host first
sudo modprobe vcan
sudo ip link add dev vcan0 type vcan 2>/dev/null || true
sudo ip link set up vcan0

docker run --rm -it \
  --network host \
  -v "$(pwd)/config.toml:/config/config.toml:ro" \
  ecuemulator

Config handling:

• The container reads config from ${CONFIG_PATH} (default: /config/config.toml).
• If you don’t bind-mount a config file, the container will seed /config/config.toml from /config/sample_config.toml.
• You can override the CAN interface at runtime with CAN_INTERFACE. Example: -e CAN_INTERFACE=vcan42.

Docker Compose

# seed a config in the repo root (first run)
cp -n data/sample_config.toml ./config.toml || true

# create vcan0 on the host first
sudo modprobe vcan
sudo ip link add dev vcan0 type vcan 2>/dev/null || true
sudo ip link set up vcan0

docker compose up --build

Development

Running CI Checks

The repository includes a CI script (ci-rust.sh) that runs all quality checks on the Rust implementation. This script is used both locally and in GitHub Actions

Run all checks:

./ci-rust.sh
# or explicitly
./ci-rust.sh all

Run individual checks:

./ci-rust.sh build         # Build the project
./ci-rust.sh test          # Run tests
./ci-rust.sh fmt           # Check code formatting
./ci-rust.sh clippy        # Run clippy linter

You can fix formatting or linter issues by adding the -fix suffix to the command. e.g: ./ci-rust.sh clippy-fix