Helping some students diagnose a current draw issue on their off season bot. Looking through the documentation there seems to be a wealth of information on the CAN bus that could be useful.
Has anyone used a logging device that sits on the network and records all messages sent across it? I have a few CSS CL2000 units gathering dust at work.
If this has been done, are there spy lists available for the FRC legal devices? I haven’t come across them in any of the documentation I’ve seen.
In general, FRCFIRST Robotics Competition vendors have decided to keep their CAN protocol details proprietary (instead defining the interface to teams at the software API level), so there’s basically no public information for motor controller CAN frames. CTRE has added a feature for 2024 to log (on the Rio) the data going over CAN for their devices; some data can be exported in the free version, but a more complete export requires their Pro license.
For the handful of components in the “core” control system (PDPCTRE's Power Distribution Panel, PCM, PDHREV's Power Distribution Hub, PH) the implementation is public (in the WPILib HAL), so the CAN frame definitions can be extracted from that.
The universal heartbeat from the Rio is also (partially) documented (more information exists and isn’t considered proprietary, the docs just don’t include all the details).