Controlling CAN Jaguar directly from PC (No cRIO)

[dgstone18]

Hi, I am currently working on a robot project in my high school honors robotics class and we are attempting to interface and control two black jaguars through the CAN interface directly connected to a laptops serial/usb port. I know that the connection is working because I can control motors with the bdc-comm program as it is being recognised as a comm port. We are using the labview package supplied through the FIRST program and all updates are installed. After messing around with the VIs and scouring the internet, it seems that all of WPI labview VIs are dependant on the cRIO. I was wondering if anyone knew a way to program the jaguars while completely bypassing the cRIO. Also using a pwm interface is also an option for us so any help doesn't need to be CAN specific. Whether it be using new VIs or changing the current VIs, any help would be greatly apreciated. Thanks

[kamocat]

There is a way, though I'm not sure it will be what you want.
BDC-COMM has a command prompt option.
LabVIEW can interface to the command prompt, or directly to library functions. I can tell you right now this will be a lot of work.

The other way would be to drop the BDC-COMM completely, and make your own. If you do this, make sure you use the firmware TI provides on their website, not the FRC firmware, because otherwise you won't be able to set the output. (That is, unless you are up to cracking the tokenization)

In short: you have the opportunity to do some low-level interfacing that we don't normally have to do in FRC. If you enjoy that, go for it! If you don't, it might be best to look into a different option.