While working to build the reduced weight moteus servo mk2, I got tired of hand machining the first operation on a manual mill and lathe for the front and back housings.  It was necessary, primarily to enable workholding on the PocketNC v2-50, but also because it allowed me to remove much of the excess material more quickly than could be done on the PNC.  So, I got trained up on the AA CNC Bridgeport and went to town.

Before ordering a bigger batch of the new moteus r4.1 controller, I wanted some assurance that it would be able to run for an extended periods of time under representative loads while not breaking or having thermal issues.

When I did this for the r3.1 controller, I had 2 motor joints and a planar leg built and did a jumping endurance test.  I could have done that now, but building up a leg fixture was more work than I wanted to mess with at the moment, so I went with a simpler approach:

While working to build a weight reduced moteus servo mk2, I reworked my outer housing CAM to do all the machining on the Pocket NC v2-50.  For this part I didn’t necessarily need any challenging workholding and since I could get the stock in tube form, there wasn’t an inordinate amount of material to remove either.

The one challenge is that when mounted in the Sherline Chuck, the mill can’t actually reach all the way to the edge of the part without hitting the X travel limit (which is why most of the other 100mm diameter parts I do are fixtured slightly off-center).  In this case I tackled the problem in two iterations.

While continuing to bring up the r4.1 moteus controller I reached a mini-milestone where it spun a motor for the first time!

After having produced the first functional demonstration of the moteus servo mk2, my next step was to decrease the weight.  While I was at it, I made two other changes:

• Axial connections: I switched to a design with entirely axial connectors, which removes the need for 4th axis machining when producing the parts.
• Planet Input Bearing: I switched the planet input bearing to be inserted from the rotor side.  This way, the bearing is captured between the planet input and the rotor, rather than between the planet input and the gears.  That also improves the ability to assemble and disassemble the unit.

Another step in my plan for the next revision of the moteus servo mk2, is an updated controller board.  As mentioned in my roadmap, I wanted to revise this board to make improvements in a number of domains:

• Communications: Now instead of RS485, the primary communications interface is FD-CAN.  This supports data rates of up to 8 Mbit and packet lengths up to 64 bytes.  The header is nominally at the original CAN bit rate, but I have no need to be standards compliant and am running very short busses so I may run everything at the higher rate.
• Connectors: Now there exist power connectors, in the form of XT30 right angle connectors and they are also daisy chainable like the data connectors.  Additionally, all the connectors exit from the bottom of the board to make routing easier in configurations like the full rotation leg.
• Controller: This uses the relatively new STM32G4 controller series.  It is lower power than the STM32F4, supports FD-CAN, and also supports closely coupled memory, which may allow me to improve the speed of the primary control loop execution by 3 times.
• Voltage range: This board now has 40V main FETS, with all other components at 50V rating or higher.  Thus it should be safe with inputs up to 8S (34V or so).

Now that I have at least one functioning version of each of the pieces made for the moteus servo mk2 (planet input, outer housing, front housing, and back housing), I integrated all of them together into a functional prototype.

The back housing is the final piece of the moteus mk2 servo that I wanted to prototype.  (The planet output is identical to the mk1, so I could use extra stock I had of it for the prototypes).  It is large, and only mates directly to 4 other things, which makes it a little less complex than the front housing.

Design

I had initially designed the back housing to mate to the as-yet-unannounced new version of the moteus controller, the r4.x series.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any of those working yet, so I tweaked the design to temporarily fit a r3.1 controller, which looks like this:

The front housing is the most complex machined piece in the moteus servo mk2, as it was in the mk1.  It is relatively large and mates with many other components with the associated tight tolerance surfaces.  For mk2, the front housing is even larger in diameter, but otherwise has the same basic features.

Manufacturing

Building a prototype of this was a real challenge given the tools I have available to me now.  For mk1, I didn’t even try and just had Xometry build my prototypes, and was lucky enough that the first ones worked.  My only CNC currently is the Pocket NC v2-50, which is just barely big enough to deal with this part, and has no convenient workholding that can be used for the stock.  Also, it has a low material removal rate, such that starting from stock here would be prohibitively time consuming.

The outer housing for the moteus servo mk2 is just a precision round tube with some mounting holes drilled peripherally.  Still, manufacturing it was slightly annoying, mostly because of my available machining resources.

Manufacturing

I started off with round tube stock with some extra margin on the inside and outside:

Then I went and used the manual lathe at Artisan’s Asylum to get the correct ID, OD and length: