moteus_tool --restore-config

November 01, 2023

For the moteus brushless controller, the moteus_tool utility has long had a --dump-config command line action which will cause the entire contents of the configuration to be written to standard output.

--dump-config format

This configuration looks like this:

servo.pid_position.kp 4
servo.pid_position.kd 0.1

moteus_tool has also had a --write-config option, which is something of a misnomer, as it actually just sends any commands one at a time from a file to the controller. Notably, it requires that the file to contain actual valid diagnostic mode commands.

--write-config format

Thus, if you wanted to restore the above two configuration options, and then save those values to persistent storage, the file contents would need to be:

conf set servo.pid_position.kp 4
conf set servo.pid_position.kd 0.1
conf write

As of pypi version 0.3.62, the moteus_tool --restore-config action will now accept the --dump-config format directly and also send the conf write at the conclusion. This means that --restore-config can now be used directly with the output of --dump-config. Yay!