CAN vs PWM

[Radical Pi]

Originally Posted by ratdude747

1. what all does the programmer need to know to convert the code written for pwm to CAN?

I'm a C++ programmer, so this may not be 100% accurate, but from my understanding of the LabVIEW API you just need to replace the references to the regular Jaguar VIs with CANJaguar VIs

Originally Posted by ratdude747

2. is the cRIO FTP thing the same?

Nothing changes in the stuff to upload from C++ to LabVIEW

Side note: Your PDF may not have said this, but you need to make sure to undo the change to ni-rt.ini before attempting to re-image the cRIO. For some reason it fails if the CAN plugin is loaded.

Originally Posted by ratdude747

the electrical and firmware thing i have down... I was made electrical subteam leader today and i read the pdf and my laptop is set to be a reflash device (you use the homemade serial dongle to do that, right?).

any other advice?

Yep, the serial dongle is all you need to reflash the jaguars.

Make sure you have plenty of extra cables. One broken cable will most likely take the entire network down. We have 2 or 3 spare jag-jag (2 wire) cables, and an extra jag-cRIO (6-wire) cable. We also found it useful to make a second serial dongle and keep the spare jag-cRIO cable with it so we don't have to dig the connection out of the robot if anything goes wrong (like last year's device number reset bug). A spare termination resistor is also a good idea.

Also, be extra careful about disconnecting power to jaguars. Even though the bus can still travel through an unpowered jaguar, C++ had a (hopefully fixed) bug that would cause glitches if it didn't receive responses from a jaguar. Not sure if LV had that same bug.