Your take on CAN...

[RyanN]

I'm curious as to what other teams think of CAN. Is your team using it? If so, why? If not, why not? Any problems that keep on popping up for no apparent reason?

I ask this because I know Team Fusion wanted to use CAN for the main sake of getting rid of the spaghetti. We were also interested in the different control features such as a configurable voltage ramp, current status, voltage status, fault status, etc...

We wanted to use it last year, but encountered too many bugs (which were later fixed with new cRIO images and firmware) during build season. This year is a different story.

We did have an issue, which I cannot comment on, where CAN stopped working, but I was able to easily fix it when I went home for the weekend to mentor. Basically the cRIO somehow got stuck into safe mode, the students reimaged it, but did not turn Net Console off properly.

The main issue that worries me is the RS-232 portion from the cRIO to the Jaguar, as motor noise, vibrations, etc... can interfere with the connection, but supposedly the firmware is built strong enough to combat these problems.

I'm fairly confident about the actual CAN portion though, I mean they use CAN everywhere in industry, right down to the car you drive (if you're old enough )

We aren't placing all bets on it though. It's only running our shooter, so if it does go out, we're still a really good defensive bot with the ability to heard balls and cause major chaos on the field.

So yea... what's everyone else's take on CAN? Who's using it? Who isn't? Why? How are you using it?