Quote:
Originally Posted by lopsided98
You are required to use CAN to connect your PDP this year, even if you aren't going to use CAN for pneumatics or motor controllers (according to R61). Your robot won't work without it.
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I think it's worth pointing out that a robot that does not have the PDP CAN bus wired to the roboRIO can bus
will still *basically function. The features that require the PDP to be connected are the current sensing and current logging. Certainly these features are not necessary to get your robot up and driving. So you really can't blame the rest of the robot not working on the observation that the PDP is not connected correctly.
However for your robot to be
legal, then yep PDP has to be wired per R61. This guarantees at a minimum that you can walk up to any comp robot (with any language or even no program code) and monitor the current draws live (self test in roboRIO Web-page configuration) and also see previously logged currents (when the viewer becomes available).
Also everyone please note that the latest rule update requires 1.37 or newer PDP firmware, which is in your FRC install directory (C:\Users\Public\Documents\FRC).
EDIT...
*one wrinkle worth explaining, since the PDP has the 120Ω term resistor built-in, you may find it to be functionally necessary to add the PDP to CAN bus when using other CAN devices. However that resistor is always in circuit inside the PDP, and therefore does not depend on the firmware state or firmware version of the PDP.