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.

The solution is to manually specify the bus timings when configuring the socketcan link. This makes the MCP2518FD boards work, and also PEAK-CAN-FD USB adapters (and probably every other socketcan CAN-FD adapter) work as well. You can find the timings linked in the moteus reference documentation: https://github.com/mjbots/moteus/blob/main/docs/reference.md#bit-timings

General socketcan improvements

As a result of all this debugging, I made some general improvements to socketcan support in all the client side moteus tools.

1. There is now a documented commandline for invoking moteus_tool from socketcan: https://github.com/mjbots/moteus/blob/main/docs/reference.md#moteus_tool-configuration
2. I released moteus and moteus_pi3hat 0.2.0 to pypi. These provide socketcan interfaces for python, transparently using them if no fdcanusb or pi3hat peripherals are found.

Thanks for everyone on discord’s patience as we worked through these compatibility issues!