Thread: CAN Bus Layout
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Unread 08-02-2010, 11:56
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Re: CAN Bus Layout
To close the loop on our CAN saga. We have it all working now with 10 black Jaguars. It was quite a haul but it CAN be done

What we found:
The Jaguar's seem more sensitive than we would have thought to the RJ11 connectors used in them. Things didn't get reliable for us until we used the actual AMP/Tyco RJ11 connectors specified by Luminary Micro. There are no doubt others that will work but, for example, the ones from Frys and Home Depot were quite flaky for us. Ours came from Mouser http://mouser.com/Search/Refine.aspx?Keyword=5-641335

We tried making the terminator by just crimping the wires of the 100 ohm resistor into the RJ11 connector. That turned out to be unreliable in our case. Everything is fine now that we're soldering the resistor on the end of a short cable (the same stuff use use for the other CAN cables) coming out of the connector.

We're using the 2CAN Ethernet/CAN adapter distributed by AndyMark. It's nice in that you get loads of diagnostic data, don't have to worry about sending commands too fast, and it downloads firmware to the Jaguars in a couple of seconds rather than forever with the RS-232 interface. The RS-232 interface can probably work fine, too, but we were so excited to finally get something to work with CAN we didn't want to mess with it any more.

Triple check that all of your Jaguars have the new firmware downloaded from http://www.luminarymicro.com/jaguar
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