Well put Kevin. With the Talon SRX specifically, we took the lessons learnt from seasons past to make the CAN use-case a lot more robust and painless.
-With weidmuller connectors, there is no risk of bad crimps or bad connectors.
-With the terminating resistor built into the roboRIO and PDP there is no risk of manually soldering resistors or hand-crimping them and not being sure they are actually in-circuit.
-With the new lightening tab in the DS you can grab the CAN bus utilization (%) and error counts.
-The roboRIO web-based configuration will tell you when you have multiple CAN nodes with the same devID and will let you fix it without isolating one CAN node.
-boot-loaders for all new CAN nodes gracefully handle bad firmware files, losing power/CAN in middle of flash, flashing wrong product firmware, etc...
This season's CAN implementation really is a new type of animal.
If you really want the details checkout the Talon user's guide and Talon software ref manual at....
http://www.crosstheroadelectronics.c...ol_system.html
Also the FRC screensteps page has lots of good info...
http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...ribution-panel
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
To be fair, most of those complications you mention are completely optional. The only mandatory complication with CAN is that you initially have to assign a unique address to each Talon, PDP, and PCM on the CAN bus. And you have to assign the correct ID to any Talon you have to replace for some reason. Now that all the the assignment happens on the roboRIO webpage, I think it's only a little more complicated than wiring up a dozen PWMs to the correct ports.
I'll readily admit the using CAN before this year was rather more complicated, since you needed to make up the correct RJ11 cables, terminate the bus correctly, make up a (correct) serial-RJ11 adapter, and (shudder) deal with BDC Comm for assigning IDs and testing. Definitely more complicated last year.
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