BLAST is a diagnostic tool for the LIN sub-bus for the automotive industry, now an ISO standard (ISO 17987-6). Messages can be sent and received. Using a standard serial port for transmission and reception BLAST provides simple diagnostics and control of a LIN sub bus. You can cache up to five messages for transmission and send those messages in a loop with a variable inter-message delay.

NOTE: Windows does not maintain the timing integrity of the serial data stream and the events (such as break detection) from the serial port. So you can have situations where the character after the break arrives before the break detect event arrives to this application, thus making a perceived invalid LIN message when in fact a good message was sent. UNIX and Mac OS encodes and inserts the break event in the data stream so this can not happen.  I will offer a Mac version when I have time.

NOTE: Most USB to serial adapter drivers do not properly implement the system call to find out if the transmitter buffer is empty. This makes it difficult to determine if the Break has finished being sent. To solve this we add delay between the break and the rest of the message. This delay may be insufficient for slow systems.

LIN Bus links

BLAST  (Basic LIN Application Support Tool)

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