For most of mjbots’ existence, all of our products were labeled with a dependable, if lackluster, Brother P-Touch label maker. In line with other packaging improvements, I recently upgraded that labeling setup to bigger, higher resolution, and full color!

This is using an Epson TM-C3500, which I had expected to operate directly from my Linux based test fixtures. However, upon receiving it, discovered that alas only Windows drivers were available. Thankfully, it wasn’t too bad to print from python in a simple way as long as you manually select the media type from the Windows dialogs. Thus I made up a simple Flask app to receive label images over HTTP and print them. That runs on a Windows computer, and the test fixture applications just POST their label images to it.

The pi3hat, among other things has 5 CAN-FD ports. You can use them to drive a lot of moteus servos, but they are perfectly fine CAN-FD ports generally. The C++ library has always been able to send and receive arbitrary frames (and recently at arbitrary bitrates), but the python interface was lacking, only exposing a portion of this functionality.

As of version 0.3.11, the python library (pip3 install moteus-pi3hat) now exposes everything you need to be able to send and receive arbitrary CAN frames from any of the ports, as well as configure all the timing options for waiting for responses from slave devices.

This is somewhat belated, but only recently have I actually gotten them all set up in the desired configuration. Welcome to the newest members of the mjbots factory line, another 2 Prusa MK3Ss! That makes 4 total, now all neatly lined up in a row:

The first two have had a greater than 60% duty cycle over the 3 years I’ve had them, and situations kept coming up where I was blocked on 3d printer bandwidth. For now at least that need is sated.

TLDR: moteus can now filter the encoder, resulting in less audible noise. Use firmware version 2021-04-20 and ‘pip3 install moteus’ version 0.3.19, then re-calibrate to get the benefits.

Background

The moteus controller uses an absolute magnetic encoder to measure the position of the rotor. It uses this knowledge to accurately control the current through the three phases of a brushless motor so that the desired torque is produced, i.e. “field oriented control”. This works well, but has some downsides. One, is that magnetic encoders work by sensing the magnetic field produced by a “sensing magnet” that is somehow affixed to the rotor. This sensing process always introduces some noise, so that the sensed rotor position is never perfect.

In what probably won’t be the last time, mjbots.com now has a new version of the pi3hat due solely to component shortages!

There are no top-level feature changes versus the previous r4.4. What is different is that the connector for the Raspberry Pi has reverted to the fixed height version that the r4.3 and earlier used, and the IMU is slightly better.

Happy building!