CAN BUS Control Score 8091
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
In the example of the cheetah mini motors listed above ($300) he used this Ardurino library to control:
https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/CAN_BUS_Shield
The Gluon robotic arm motors are controlled using a small library Skyntific wrote using 11 simple commands seen here: (these motors not available til June 2020)
...from this video :
Nice find Will. I looked over his Kiskstarter page and was real impressed. That video with Naomi Wu is sure impressive. She really knows how to program and work that arm. Very smooth with hardly any bounce.
Yeah Naomi is a hoot. And really talented
Hey guys, just in case you are still thinking about implementation of those Cheetah Mini actuators, I found pretty good info on how to use them!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QIEI6IdHOcW4N1cRyucb33io4LriNYafIMs1sjLfTQU/edit
SCA QDD Lite-N30 actuators ($89/$99) is also supersweet...plus they offer kind of an all in one package, which is super easy to use!!
Thanks for the link! These CANBUS actuators are the future for robotics. The compliance portion of the motor will keep robots from hurting humans.
Yup...pretty good products, been thinking about a bigger humanoid arm lately, its becoming more easy and affordable these days!!
You guys have to agree on a specific model and product to use before investing time into creating a skill control for it. Remember, every single one of them use a different protocol - it's like dynamixel times 100. There's all different and use a different language - so once you decide on one, then you can support it. Otherwise, it is impossible to support all of them because there is no standard.
I've repeated that message a few times earlier in this thread. Get the product you want. Make sure it's the right one. Then support can be added for THAT one. It won't work for any other one. Every one you want till require a completely new reinvention of the skill control.