It appears that the new Black Jaguar Motor Controllers are capable of interfacing with either a standard serial port at at bit rate of 115.2 kbps, or a Controller Area Network (CAN) interface. See the data sheet available at:
http://www.luminarymicro.com/products/mdl-bdc24.html (don't bother to register, just select "OPTIONS"). It seems that the Black Jaguar can act as a Serial to CAN gateway to all of the motor controllers in the system. This implies that a single serial port on the cRIO will be able to control all of the motors on the robot, getting rid of the pesky requirement for a $1000 CAN interface module on the cRIO. It also implies that a single Black Jaguar in the system can act as a CAN gateway to all of the older Tan Jaguars that we already have. This will give us access to to motor current and voltage, and the built in quadrature encoders. In the data sheet it actually says that the Black Jaguar "Directly interfaces to a PC serial port or National Instruments cRIO".
My question is to those cRIO people out there: Do we have access to the serial port on the cRIO, or is already being used for some other function (debugging or diagnostics) in the system?
If the serial port is available, I see no reason why everyone shouldn't be using the CAN interface this year.
Thoughts?