What is a car port?

A car port enables openpilot support on a particular car. Each car model openpilot supports needs to be individually ported. All car ports live in openpilot/selfdrive/car/car_specific.py and opendbc_repo/opendbc/car.

The complexity of a car port varies depending on many factors including: * existing openpilot support for similar cars * architecture and APIs available in the car

Structure of a car port

• interface.py: Interface for the car, defines the CarInterface class
• carstate.py: Reads CAN from car and builds openpilot CarState message
• carcontroller.py: Builds CAN messages to send to car
• values.py: Limits for actuation, general constants for cars, and supported car documentation
• radar_interface.py: Interface for parsing radar points from the car

Overiew

Jason Young gave a talk at COMMA_CON with an overview of the car porting process. The talk is available on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/KcfzEHB6ms4?si=5szh1PX6TksOCKmM