Our CAN Tale of Woe

[Shinigami2057]

You can use off-the-shelf cables - CAN-to-CAN connections (not serial-to-CAN) use 6P4C connectors, which means you can use standard RJ-11/RJ-12/RJ-25 phone cable. The only "non-standard" cable is the serial RS-232 cable you make for using the Black Jaguar as a bridge. This can be made with (standard) RJ25 phone cabling, a DB9 modular adapter, and a 100 ohm resistor as show in the Getting Started Guide. All of these were listed with corresponding Digikey part numbers.

I think the moral of the story is for teams to read the directions, twice (perhaps there is an EE analogue of 'measure twice, cut once'). The Jaguar manuals were very clear in the requirements for making the bridge cable. If you try and hack together hardware like many teams (including our team) hacks at code, without reading the directions, you'll get bitten pretty hard.