Sunday April 14th 2002 Avionics Workshop
Participants: Jamey, James, Nate, Paul and Andrew
Overview:
We had a grand time today attempting to get the CAN bus up and working... with the key word being "attempt". Our agenda was to get the FC, the MCP2510 devleopment board, and a new (finished last night by modifying an old PIC16F877+SJA1000 board) PIC18F458 board.
We had problems right away - we apparently never wrote down how to connect things and what the CAN timing registers should be. So we "rediscovered" and documented them (see CanDeviceBusTimings) and still couldn't get the CAN bus to work. There were several connection problems at first, but then after those were fixed it seemd like a weird disconnection error... as if the FC's 82527 wasn't responding.
We ran out of time before we could get the PIC18458 boad up and running - having a third node would tell us where the problem was (MCP2510 board, FC, or cabling).
Flight Computer:
James and Jamey booted the FC with the CF carrier board mounted on the PC104 stack (see LvTwoCompactFlash). They also did other stuff. James? Jamey?
CAN Nodes:
Andrew, Paul and Nate got the PIC18F458 board to blink an LED. Oh, the excitement. Actually, frankly, it was exciting, because it was the first attempt to use the ICD2, a PIC18F458 and the latest MPLAB release with the Microchip C-18 compiler... and amazingly, it worked the FIRST time. We were stunned.
We tried to get the board to send CAN messages, but time was running out by then.
Task list:
Andrew is going to try and get the PIC18F458 board to spew CAN messages.
Nate and Paul should read up on the CAN peripheral in the 18F458 manual.
James should continue to document the CAN driver and hack it as necessary.
Evidence:
"That's funny! This worked last time...":
You can pick your friends, and you can PIC your node...:
"That's all, folks!!" :
