moteus firmware version 1.0.0!

Releases

The first public version of moteus-r4 was announced way back in 2019. Since that time, there have been many new board variants and innumerable additional features and capabilities. Amazingly, through all of that, the CAN-FD wire protocol has actually remained backwards compatible the entire time! It is still possible to monitor that very first moteus with tview, and to command it using the register protocol with appropriate configuration. Many projects hem and haw about releasing a version 1.0 of their software, justifying breaking things from a users perspective over and over again. Here, we’ve actually maintained nearly complete backwards compatibility despite having a pure time based release versioning scheme.

That’s about to change now!

Well, not the part about maintaining backwards compatibility, at least for the foreseeable future. What is changing is the release naming strategy. Instead of time based releases for the firmware and c++ library, and an “unstable” version for the python library, we’re switching to a pretty traditional semver model where the version number signifies something about the type of change involved. That also gives us the ability to release “patch” updates that just fix bugs, to decrease the risk of unintentional regressions when upgrading. Currently there is no “maintenance timeline” policy for releases, but we’ll take it as we go.

Without further ado, here are the releases!

Changes

In addition to the new number, there are actually some useful changes in the firmware and python client tooling for moteus in this release. Details will be elaborated on in future posts, but some highlights:

  • Improved performance with hall sensor configurations
  • Improved robustness to malicious CAN-FD commands

Future

Here’s hoping we’ll have another 7 years of moteus releases ahead of us with who knows what features and capabilities!