Serial to CAN Gateway in new Black Jaguars?

[Al Skierkiewicz]

d et al,
Remember that although the jaguars had CAN last year, the rules did not yet allow it to be used. Please hold your ideas until kickoff when you will know for sure.
From a personal standpoint, a daisy chain loop of control signals does provide a single point failure for all/most/some robot function.

[EricVanWyk]

Also, remember that the Jaguar is a piece of TI's advertising strategy. Professional Electrical Engineers can use the Jag as a "getting started" evaluation kit for ARM core that powers it. Therefore, it is in TI's best interest to cram as much awesome as possible into it, even if the GDC doesn't want to enable the awesome.

The 2CAN has a couple of cool features that a serial enabled black Jag doesn't. It will be up to teams to decide whether or not they justify the cost.

We all have to wait to see what the rules allow, but I'm certainly excited.

*EDIT: Like bandwidth!

[dmcguire3006]

TI's purchasing Luminary Micro never has made a whole lot of sense to me. It's not like TI didn't have the expertise to license the ARM core and program it themselves. I think that they are more focused on the power MOSFETs which is probably the largest part of the real cost of the Jaguar controller, rather than the microcontroller and associated programming.
http://focus.ti.com/general/docs/gen...ontentId=53265

That being said, they do make a big deal about the serial enabled nature of the Black Jag in the literature developed specifically for FIRST. I think that I'll buy a couple and the DB-9 to RJ11's and have one of my team members investigate the interface just on a hunch.

Thanks for everyone's input.

[s1900ahon]

Originally Posted by dmcguire3006

TI's purchasing Luminary Micro never has made a whole lot of sense to me. It's not like TI didn't have the expertise to license the ARM core and program it themselves. I think that they are more focused on the power MOSFETs which is probably the largest part of the real cost of the Jaguar controller, rather than the microcontroller and associated programming.

It sounds like you think TI acquired LMI for the purposes of Jaguar. It didn't. TI's acquisition of LMI was for all of the microcontrollers (MCUs) that LMI developed and were selling (plus the eval kits plus the software that accompanied the eval kits, etc.). TI acquired a catalog MCU business that complements their existing MCU offerings (C2000 and MSP430).

The Jaguar speed controller is a design example of how to use one of the MCUs in a brushed DC motor control application.

[dmcguire3006]

Luminary doesn't own the ARM processor. ARM does:
http://www.arm.com/products/licensing/

I could license the core and (with enough funding) become a fabless production house tomorrow. TI wants to sell silicon and the best way to do that is MOSFETs.

No sense in buying a processor that they will have to license through ARM anyway. imho.