When setting up a moteus controller with a new motor, you typically first run the automatic calibration sequence as documented in the reference manual. When your system is working well, that should be all that is necessary to enable moteus to perform accurate FOC based torque control of the motor. Then you can set up basic parameters and tune the position PID control loop. What happens though when the automatic calibration doesn’t work? This post shares the most common failure modes during calibration.

The perils of technical videos is that they can become out of date pretty quickly. For the moteus getting started guide, it has amazingly held up pretty well, but enough has changed since 2021 that it is time for a new one. Now we can use acceleration and velocity limited commands instead of the deprecated stop position and get nicer 4k b-roll for all the intermissions. Everything in the old video, and in this new one, is applicable to both the moteus-r4.11 and the moteus-n1.

I made an overview video for my Pocket NC touch probe integration!

The original write ups can be found at:

• Part 1 - Motivation
• Part 2 - Mechanical Hardware
• Part 3 - Electrical
• Part 4 - Software

And the designs and source code can be found at:

People over in the mjbots discord frequently ask about how to build reliable XT30 cables, so I made a short video describing how I go about it!

For those who have been annoyed by the misplaced I2C connector on the r4.3 moteus model, I’ve finally updated the 2D and 3D mechanical drawings for the moteus controller in github:

https://github.com/mjbots/moteus/tree/main/hw/controller/r4.5

And in the same vein, we received a great user contribution from Rüdiger Koch-Kukies in the form of a solid model of the mj5208 motor!

With new python based moteus tview and moteus_tool available, and the new mj5208 motor being included in all the moteus devkits, I figured it was time to update the moteus getting started video. Here it is!

I’ve had a lot of discord questions lately! Here’s a video with the answer to another common question, can the moteus controller be set to purely damp:

Someone contacted me not too long ago who wanted to use the moteus controller, but wasn’t sure if it would be able to hit their target mechanical velocity of 6000rpm. I honestly wasn’t either, so I tested it. After a quick firmware fix, the devkit motor when run at 34V seems to be able to do it no problem.

It should be noted that the current firmware assumes you are within a thousand or so revolutions of 0. You can exceed that pretty quickly running at 120 revolutions per second!