Talon SRX Motor Controller Problem

[Bkeeneykid]

Originally Posted by FTC Team CC

Thank you all for the replies. A couple of questions:

1. So if we used the CAN ports, which don't use parallel circuiting, would it be right to say that if one motor controller were to stop receiving power, then the rest of them would not receive any inputs through the CAN wires?

2. Should we use Anderson Powerpoles to link together CAN wires or a different mechanism? What is the cleanest way of linking CAN wires?

We are probably going to stick with the CAN ports.

Thanks for the help,
Charging Champions

We used CTR's CAN Connector Pack to connect our SRXs this year. They worked great, just put some electrical tape over the exposed solder points on the bottom (just in case). Makes it very simple to re wire the CAN network (as we had to do as we needed more motor controllers suddenly), and means you don't risk damaging the cables much with other connectors. It uses the same connectors as on the PDP, PCM and roboRIO. It may not be the cleanest way (our board was not very clean this year), but it certainly makes it easy to change later. Anderson connectors would be cleaner cut to the right length, but for the CAN wires, these connectors are overkill. Try .1" pitch PWM wires maybe instead?

And as Rohit said, most CAN devices just connect high-high and low-low and just take that signal elsewhere for processing. Also, you don't have much probability of one dying on you. Though more likely, if one died your code would crash as it couldn't initialize the CANTalon anymore. That's assuming the entire thing just died rather than the just the voltage controlling circuitry, which is more likely. The SRX is advanced enough to have current limiting and the such, and because of that I've never seen a dead one.