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!

At the request of @nichols in discord, I’ve recently implemented a new control mode in the moteus controller, “stay within”. In this mode, as long as the controller is inside the currently commanded bounds, only a feedforward torque is commanded. When either of the optional lower or upper bound is violated, the normal PID controller is used to force the position back to the bound.

Here’s a quick video demo:

Note that this could have been roughly accomplished in a couple of ways by a higher level controller – either by monitoring the position and commanding zero kp/kd scales when inside the boundary, or just solely commanding feedforward torques based on position sensing. However, this approach lets the control run at the full 40kHz of the moteus controller, which results in much smoother operation at the boundary condition.

Recently dlickindorf pointed out in the mjbots discord that he was having problems with very low torques on his large PMSM hobby-grade motor. While moteus doesn’t have any anti-cogging support yet, it should still be capable of driving motors such that the unexpected torque isn’t much worse than the baseline cogging torque of the motor. However, he was seeing much worse behavior with controlling to 0 current, as much as a full percent of the maximum torque of the motor.

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:

In another discord moment, someone was asking about the difference between electrolytic capacitors and multi-layer ceramic capacitors. That, plus some desire to re-rate the moteus, inspired me to do another sweep and measure the DC bus voltage ripple for various power levels. I captured this plot with a 24V power supply, with a 5008 motor with 0.061 ohm of winding resistance or so, and each current being applied for 300ms. The voltage ripple is peak to peak measured at the power connector.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve had an increasing number of people looking for help with self-built moteus controllers which is great!  However, until today there hasn’t been a great way to get help.  Blog comments fall off the front page quickly, and there is no real other mechanism.

Thus, I’ve created a discord server:

• mjbots discord server

There you can chat about the moteus controller, servo, or the quada0 and get feedback and help in closer to real time.  Thanks for collaborating!