[Peter Johnson]

We used 7 black jags on CAN in 2010 and were very happy with the results. Only two issues: died in one match because we had a piece of hardware fall onto the CAN connector and disconnect it (random failure, similar thing could have happened to the cRIO or any other single-point failure on the robot), and in one other match (in division quarterfinals, scarily!) we had a cRIO bootup sequencing issue (I believe since fixed in the image) that caused the CAN driver to not start. The Jaguars were mounted vertically along the edges of the robot, and we never had one die. We used current sensing (via CAN) on our ball magnet motor to detect possession, worked great.

We used 7 black jags on CAN in 2011, and 2 victors. We had a lot of electrical issues, we believe mostly due to our control board placement (belly pan style) which led to lots of metal debris falling onto the control board. We did switch our drive motors to PWM control halfway through championships because of a couple of control issues (we believe traceable to CAN synchronous updates).

In future years we're still planning on using jags and CAN, but being more careful with our electrical board placement to avoid the debris issues we saw in 2011.