[Rookie] How to set up electrical the best way?

[otherguy]

Originally Posted by slijin

The problem we had wasn't due to wiring (confirmed by swapping wires between connections to confirm functionality), but more likely due to internal Jaguar complications (which seem to pervade all our attempts to coax them into being functional).

In any case, I would believe that the rationale behind a backbone would be that it would allow one's CAN to continue functioning even in the event of a bizarre Jaguar breakdown in which the hardwired connection is somehow shorted or cut.

Our team ran the entire season last year using CAN without a single wiring or programming issue. We made the cables once and forgot about it. We went to two regionals and 3 off season events. The robot was driven all summer for driver training, brought to demos for fund raising, and is being used now to demo code and test functions for the 2012 games. And everything's still working, and everything's over CAN. I personally can't say the same for any of our robots PWM cables in the past.

To me, the backbone element gets rid of my favorite feature of CAN, clean simple wiring. And I don't think I quite understand the rational that it would help resolve shorts/cut of your communications cables. I would think this system is still susceptible to shorts, and if a wire is getting cut during a match, then me or my electrical team made a grave mistake in how we ran the wires...

That said, the wiring in that backbone box is really clean. If that's the route a team wants to go it looks like a nice reliable solution.