Canbus pros and cons

[Cookies]

Hi. im just wondering wat the major pros and cons for a canbus are. a list wud greatly be appreciated. =) thank you

[Joe Ross]

What pros and cons have you already found from your own research?

[billbo911]

One indirect advantage of using CAN is that you can take advantage of the intelegence built into the Jaguars. For instance, you can set up the Jag to perform the PID control of a system rather than having the cRio manage that process. That frees up the cRio to do the Jag can't do, things like image processing.!

[Doug G]

We found that it made the wiring much simpler and neater. Just be sure to get a good crimper, extra ends, and absolutely test every wire made both physically and electrically.

A down side is if one of your wires fail, the whole bus fails.

Here's our e-board from 2010. 8 Jags on a two sided lexan panel. Just plug it in and go. Something we are considering for this year is maybe adding some strain relief to the connections as a precaution. Here's a better pic..

[diviney]

Originally Posted by Doug G

Here's our e-board from 2010. 8 Jags on a two sided lexan panel. Just plug it in and go. Something we are considering for this year is maybe adding some strain relief to the connections as a precaution.

Nice board, but how did you pass inspection without a main 120A breaker (elsewhere on the robot with a 2nd Anderson connector to the e-board I hope?)

[Doug G]

Originally Posted by diviney

Nice board, but how did you pass inspection without a main 120A breaker (elsewhere on the robot with a 2nd Anderson connector to the e-board I hope?)

You got it right! We had the main breaker mounted on the robot and connected with Anderson connectors . We also had a motor connecter bus which you can barely make out in the pic. Just plug in motor connection and sensors and the main connector and we were done.

[JDM]

In addition to being to use the Jag's intelligence to actually control the motors, being able to use them for diagnostics is pretty handy as well.

We used them to check out our motors and gearboxes, and when there was a problem, it was much more convincing to be able to say "this motor is drawing 10x the current to go the same speed" vs "this does not sound right". It turned out that a Super Shifter gear was accidentally assembled into one of our Toughboxes.


The only cons I believe stemmed from the technology being new (CAN IDs would randomly reset, the C++ library was a bit buggy and was rereleased too many times during the season IMO), but I don't expect to see these problems again.


Overall, you can do everything that CAN provides other ways, but it is very nice to have everything in one place. I would recommend it.