Falcon Motor Troubles

FIRST General Forum
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Hello everyone,

This is our first time using a falcon Motor and I was wondering if anyone could help us with our wiring. We connected the red and black electrical wires to a vex speed controller and tried to run it but it did not work. We double-checked our connections and that was fine.

We know that the falcon has a built-in speed controller but are unsure how to do that. I’m assuming the electrical cables go into the power board, and the pwn goes into the Rio. However is there any custom code I would need to take into account? If so can anyone link to those resources?

Thanks

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Your red and black power leads from the falcon should connect straight into the PDP/PDH 40A slot and then the CAN bus should be properly connected and used (CAN bus carries the signal similar to PWM).

For 1 motor you would connect one set of the green and yellow wires to the PDP/PDH and the other set to the RIO.

For 2 motors you would connect one set from motor A to the PDP/PDH then the other set from motor A to one set on motor B. Then you connect the remaining set on motor B to the RIO.

With CAN you can daisy chain them, so if you want to add another motor, you just connect it into the chain. So motor C would go from motor B to the RIO.

This thread has a link to posters that have an electronics diagram on it which might be clearer then a written explanation.

Edit: using CAN instead of PWM changes the way you program i believe. I’m a mechanical mentor so I dont know any specifics, but hopefully someone will join the conversation and help you out.

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wiring starts on page 21

I’d recommend using CAN control instead of PWM but your team might prefer PWM. The software is different and as usual there are about a million ways to accomplish the same thing. There are plenty of sample programs for the TalonFX by CTRE on github. Feel free to look at my almost basic Falcon 500 tune a PIDF program I recently wrote to test tuning. Without the PIDF stuff it’d be a lot simpler. It does include checking for errors which a lot of people skip at their peril. It does not include retrying errors 5 times as was recently posted on CD. That’s my next iteration. Note that for PIDF tuning I use the Phoenix tuner to quickly vary the parameters then when I get ones I like put them in the Java code.
TalonFX PIDF

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