CAN BUS Control Score 7775
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
Revisiting this a year later (no need to create a new thread). I'm determined more than ever to create robots with BLDC motors in positional control. I know Mickymous666 has a good tut/code on ODrives, but the pricing is too steep. Same for MJ Bots. I'm trying to make smaller more affordable and quiet servo replacements, like around $100 or less per axis(Gimble motor, magnetic encoder, driver board and ESP32 controller, , < 3 amps). SimpleFOC has really taken off and has a great discord server with a great community of knowledgeable people, their own opensource driver boards and code/libraries for Arduino. There are not that many Youtube videos about simple FOC and that's the way I learn (visual). so I have alot of question marks to fill in.
But If I get it working with PWM there wouldn't need to be a plug in for ARC..? it should just work like a standard servo. If its not very accurate (degrees) or if it cogs badly, I may have to go with serial communication and there might need to be a plugin developed for it or no??! I Don't know enough about the SimpleFOC protocols yet. I think the my main concern is when these motors start up and are looking for home position with the magnetic encoders. What keeps the whole horn from going 360 as it homes. I can see any part of a robot flying off as it spins up looking for magnetic home. I purchased a robot dog recently and you have to put it in a very specific position on start up or the legs will home in the wrong position and its all wonky. I guess if you have gearing you could eliminate some of that but you also introduce noise by having the gear boxes, which voids the original reason for building these (quiet).
Use this: https://synthiam.com/Support/Skills/Servo/Custom-Servo-Controller?id=22238
Thats a good start to get things running for prototyping before you decide if a robot skill is needed.
Excellent. Will do.