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.
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:
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: