Your take on CAN...

[Levansic]

I should have clarified. Most of the poor design choices were on rookie team robots, and the brown-outs we're not specific to the jaguars only. There were lots of conspiring issues, for quite a few teams. All were searching for a singular cause of their frustrations, when there seemed to never be just one cause. The student who complained about CAN could not cite an example of the "problems" when pressed. I suspect he was just parroting a mentor or another team member. Still, their robot functioned without fault.

My team was not competing in LA. We ran the practice station, so we saw many of these issues come through, accompanied with the anxiety to just get the robot to work reliably.

In another thread in the electrical forum, there were complaints about the field system. We didn't have problems on the practice field, but many teams had on-field failures of the radio links. Quite a few came back to the practice field trying to diagnose their problems. Some were genuine power supply issues, but not one team noticed or mentioned that there were over a dozen active Wi-fi networks in the half of the arena where the competition field was.

My point is that the cause of failures is many and varried. Often convenience and relying on hearsay causes the finger of blame to point to one component or technology, when a more thorough examination without preconceptions will unearth the true cause of problems.