Your take on CAN...

[mjcoss]

We are using CAN and used them as well last year. My concerns are the introduction of a single point of failure (2CAN), and the side effects of the safety features of the Jaguars. In a properly running system, the Jaguars run fine, and don't brown out. BUT this is a robotic competition, and bad things happen.

There has been persistent issues with timeouts. Some claim it's all just bad wiring on the part of teams, others claim that the CRIO/CAN driver is to blame, others that the 2CAN is the issue, and others that the Jaguars are bad. The upshot is that we have a number of components and lot a software in between.

One thing that I stumbled upon lst year was that if a CAN bus message timed out, the caller (in C++) receives no indication that an error occurred. This results in the CAN request returning valid (0) but incorrect data. So the test GetForwardLimitOK will return false on a timeout'd request. This can wreak havoc on code that is unaware of the issue.