CAN BUS Control Score 7768
Challenge. Go big or go home.
I'm looking into the CAN actuators used on the Cheetah mini. They are not poorly priced ($300) and offer 150 pound/inch of torque @ 24v. They are brush less, geared and have their own built in drivers, smooth motion and quiet operation. I have an up coming project and would like to control these with EZ Builder. There are arduino shields that support CAN and there is even a pre-written sketch to send data to a CAN actuator. The actuator protocol is somewhat like Dynamixels, in that you can change ID, monitor temperature, control speed, direction and position.
What say you? I'd like to see support added for more industrial actuators like this one, and Servos like ClearPath . Inspiration came from this guy (who cracks me up) and managed to pull this off very quickly using a few of the tools below. Hardware starts at 5:40.
Shield: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/can-bus-shield-hookup-guide/all Sketch: https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/CAN_BUS_Shield Actuator: Actuator
That'd be easy for anyone who takes this on... Here's how:
Done. That gives you 24 servos and default ARC 180 degree resolution
---- And your other option, if you want more servos and higher resolution:
Done. That gives you 99 servos and what ever resolution you want
I figured it would be easier, than say from scratch, since the arduino code was there. Both great options to try. Although the second one seems more intriguing, more actuators and control at 16 bit.
Anyone willing to take a crack at this? Thanks in advance. I've ordered items to test with.
To piggy back off this and to stay on topic, head over to this Kickstarter. This company decided to build a robot arm AND designed their own actuator as there is world shortage of harmonic drives. Better yet they are selling these actuators for on $99 each! They have so much going on gravity, object collision etc...run over and see the video..oh did i mention the complete robot arm is only $579? That right! and the 6 axis is a little more. This is using the same controller as shown in the above video and CANBUS.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1383636492/the-smallest-servomotor-robotic-arm
It'll be easy to make a control and communicate with the protocols for this stuff. The only thing missing here is the protocol
The fellow youtuber from Skynetific, created a great video and wrote the python script to run these on the RPi.
Very simple protocol for these very similar queries to the Dynamixel. But actuators won’t be released until June next year.
https://github.com/SkyentificGit/InnfosGluon/blob/master/innfos.py
I love Skyentific!!!
Good findings...cannot wait to see your implementation!! When will we get the reveal in whats going on behind the scenes?
These canbus motors will be for a project next year, and if implementation happens by someone who writes a control for it...
The project I’m working on now will be showcased on my YouTube channel, set to launch in January. I usually create a robot project here, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise! This robot will cover probably 8 -10 episodes, releasing one 10-15 min video a week.
A control merely needs to bind to the OnServoMovement event of the EZB.Servo library and send respective commands to the canbus controller. It'll be easy
. We just need to know what we're sending to the canbus controller to move the servos. That means we need a protocol document. Something that says "send this and a servo will move". If we know that, it's pretty much a copy and paste of the dynamixel skill control from here: https://github.com/synthiam/Behavior_Control_Dynamixel