It seems like all the posts I’m writing these days are for new products! Here’s the pi3hat r4.4:

There are two changes from the previous r4.2. First, it now supports voltage inputs up to 44V. Second, in support of future upgrades, the 5th CAN-FD port has been upgraded to support 8Mbps, but downgraded to no longer have a wide common mode voltage range.

THUS, IT IS NOT SAFE TO CONNECT THE CAN-FD PORT ON THE pi3hat r4.4 TO A power_dist r3.X BOARD.

After receiving many requests via youtube, discord, and email, I’ve finally gone ahead, bitten the bullet, and updated all of the moteus tools to be pure python and work in a cross platform manner. Now, the only thing you need to do to install pre-compiled versions of tview and moteus tool on most* platforms is:

pip3 install moteus_gui
python3 -m moteus_gui.tview    # (or maybe just tview)
python3 -m moteus.moteus_tool  # (or maybe just moteus_tool)

I’ve personally tested these on Linux, Windows, and Raspberry Pi, and others have at least verified basic operation on Macs. Python 3.7 or greater is required.

Various users have been trying to use lower-cost Raspberry Pi CAN-FD adapters for the moteus controller for some time (like this one from Seeed), but have had problems getting communication to work. I buckled down and went to debug the problem, discovering that the root of the issue was that the linux kernel socketcan subsystem calculates very sub-optimal CAN timings for the 5Mbps bitrate that moteus uses. This results in the adapters being unable to receive frames sent at the actual 5Mbps rate, but instead only slightly slower.

Over the Thanksgiving day holiday, I knew I had a bunch of harnesses to build. Rather than being a good corporate steward and actually building them, I instead built a machine to automate the first of the 3 time consuming parts of the harness construction: wire cutting and stripping.

This was just thrown together from two cosmetically damaged moteus devkits, a Raspberry Pi 3 an old development version of a pi3hat, a hand wire stripper, two synthetic rubber bands, an off the shelf 24V supply, and a bunch of 3d printed parts.

I’m excited to announce new python bindings for communicating with moteus controllers! A simple example from the README:

import asyncio
import math
import moteus

async def main():
  c = moteus.Controller()
  print(await c.set_position(position=math.nan, query=True))
  await asyncio.sleep(1.0)

asyncio.run(main())

This code will try to locate an fdcanusb on your host and use it to communicate with controller with ID 1. All of those details can be customized through code depending upon how you construct things. The library is pure python, although it doesn’t work on Windows currently because it relies on an asyncio aware pyserial wrapper that doesn’t work there.

I saw a recent Skyentific video and decided to have a try at it myself, check out the result:

Last time I covered the new software library that I wrote to help use all the features of the pi3hat, in an efficient manner. This time, I’ll cover how I measured the performance of the result, and talk about how it can be integrated into a robotic control system.

Test Setup

To check out the timing, I wired up a pi3hat into the quad A1 and used the oscilloscope to probe one of the SPI clocks and CAN bus 1 and 3.

The pi3hat r4.2, now in the mjbots store, has only minor hardware changes from the r4 and r4.1 versions. What has changed in a bigger way is the firmware, and the software that is available to interface with it. The interface software for the previous versions was tightly coupled to the quad A1s overall codebase, that made it basically impossible to use with without significant rework. So, that rework is what I’ve done with the new libpi3hat library:

I’ve now got the last custom board from the quad A1 up in the mjbots store for sale, the mjbots pi3 hat for $129.

This board breaks out 4x 5Mbps CAN-FD ports, 1 low speed CAN port, a 1kHz IMU and a port for a nrf24l01. Despite its name, it works just fine with the Rasbperry Pi 4 in addition to the 3b+ I have tested with mostly to date. I also have a new user-space library for interfacing with it that I will document in some upcoming posts. That library makes it pretty easy to use in a variety of applications.

Only 1 full year after it was released, I managed to get a Raspberry Pi 4 and test it out in the quad A1. I had been delaying doing so because of reports of thermal issues. The Pi 3B+ already ran a little hot and I didn’t want to have to add active cooling into the robot chassis to get it stable.

It looks like the Raspberry Pi engineers have been hard at work because the newer firmware releases have significantly reduced the overall power consumption and thus the thermal load. In my testing so far it only seems “a little” hotter than the 3b+.