How trash is your CAN bus?

[Vasista]

Now that we’re mid season, here’s a reminder to have a good CAN bus instead of a bad one.

1. Your entire CAN bus should never go down at once.
2. If one device gets disconnected from the CAN bus, the rest of your CAN bus should still be working.

You should be able to yank out almost any CAN wire on your robot and most of the robot should be working.

Here’s the original post from last year: Did you know that CAN is parallel?

[jnicho15]

Do others share the experience that the CANivore FD bus goes down immediately if the terminator is removed, even with a short bus?

[FinIce]

Isn’t that supposed to occur?

[Vasista]

Yes. You are supposed to have a terminating resistor on the CAN bus. The CAN FD bus used by the CANivore runs at a faster speed and therefore is less tolerant to wiring up the CAN bus wrong than the CAN 2.0B bus used by the Rio.