Seeking example of using a Falcon 500 motor with a Raspberry Pi with CAN

Programming Support
#1

Looking for a site that walks through an example of getting a Falcon 500 motor being controlled from a Raspberry Pi.

I do see the maven support site at:

http://devsite.ctr-electronics.com/maven/release/com/ctre/phoenix/

Mostly looking for insights, what CAN controllers worked well, wanting to gain off-the-field experience.

Links to technical documents or background information is great… not afraid of reading the docs and trying things… but also not wanting to re-invent the wheel or spend a lot of time fumbling around.

Thanks!

#2

Unfortunately I don’t think this is the best place for information, since the falcon motors aren’t legal in any vex competitions.

You might have more luck here.

6 Likes
#3

Are you familiar with CAN bus operation in general?

If not, then I am not sure that you want to start learning about CAN bus with Falcon 500 motor.

I would start with a smaller hobby electronics, and a good primer on CAN bus could be found here:

For controlling CAN bus devices from something like Raspberry Pi you need an additional intermediate controller chip (like MCP2515) that connects to RPi on SPI interface and then talks to CAN bus on the other side. For example:

Then Falcon 500 specific resources can be found here: http://www.ctr-electronics.com/talon-fx.html#product_tabs_technical_resources

And for the programming, there are some well organised in-depth resources here: https://phoenix-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

However, as @ThirdDegree has said this is not the best place to get support for VEX PRO products - Chief Delphi is and they happened to have several topics that cover Falcon 500 in great depth:



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#4

Is it just me or are most iq kids very confused on this topic?

#5

Another board you should look into is CTRE’s Hero dev board. They designed the motor controller in the Falcon 500. http://www.ctr-electronics.com/control-system/hro.html

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#6