[EricVanWyk]

I've tried in the past, with varying degrees of success. There was a major push internally a few years back to launch FRC-CAN as a star network, but in the end it was determined to not be worth the trouble, in both the $$ sense and the confusion sense.

That is not to say that it is impossible, and I'd love to see your implementation.

One that showed promise was a passive star. 60 Ohm termination in the center, no termination on the end points, and equal length arms. The difficulty here is making sure that all devices are the same distance from each other (electrical length wise). I never got this to be quite good enough to launch to 2000 teams, but it might be do-able for the N teams with good enough mentors to compensate.

Another option is an active star. A CAN-hub has one PHY per branch, and a CPLD to act as a fancy OR-gate. Expensive!

Lastly, you could do a 'vampire tap' system. This is a trunk with lines hanging off of it. The maximum length of each tap is determined by the speed of the bus. I don't really like this option.