[jwakeman]

We have checked the ports on the jags and we have bought off the shelf cables to avoid some uncertainty there. I had the robot 'up on blocks' with the wheels spinning free in the air so no vibration.

When all the equipment was still on the test frame I connected to the jags with my PC and BDC-COMM and I could set a current reference and run the motors with no glitches. If I then just moved the cable from my PC to the cRIO and used my robot application on the cRIO to set a current reference the motors would occasionally glitch. This behavior was confirmed several times (worked with PC, glitched with cRIO). This is what gave me the idea to run it on the table top. I assumed the difference was that the PC and its power supply were well isolated from the CAN network, where the cRIO was not. The glitches also occurred with the cRIO whether we were connected via 2CAN or RS232. Once the equipment was moved off the metal frame and out the bird's nest of wires and run on the table top then no glitches.

If none of the teams that are successfully running CAN have done anything special to isolate the CAN network from the power network I am ok with that feedback. That just tells me if we carefully and cleanly install the equipment and wiring in our final robot then we should not have issues with comm faults on the CAN network. So instead of asking what have teams done to reduce noise maybe I should ask teams to voice if they have successfully run CAN with no comm faults without any special accomodations.