This will be the final post describing the fundamentals of configuring the new flexible I/O system. There have been a number of previous posts (part 1, part 2, part 3). In this iteration, we’ll cover how to configure the sinks that consume the “source” encoder data. As a reminder, the block diagram of the I/O system looks like:

Commutation

To perform commutation with field oriented control, moteus needs to know the relationship between the rotor and stator in the magnetic domain. With the addition of the new flexible I/O system, some of the configurable values associated with this remain as they were, where there are some new ones.

First, the number of poles for the motor is still at motor.poles, and whether or not to invert the ordering of the output phases is at motor.phase_invert. Similarly, the theta mapping table has the same semantics before and remains at motor.offset.

Newly added is motor_position.commutation_source which controls which 0 indexed source is used to drive commutation.

It is shown in the block diagram above, but not discussed here yet are the cogging compensation parameters. They’ll be covered soon, I promise!

Output

The other primary purpose of encoder data within moteus is to act as feedback to the position control loop. For this, the source to use can be selected with:

motor.output.source

Additionally, an offset and sign can be configured at this stage with motor.output.offset or motor.output.sign. A gear reducer can be configured by entering a non-unity value for

motor.rotor_to_output_ratio

Values here will typically be smaller than 1. For instance, a 1:4 gear reducer would be 0.25.

Finally, to support disambiguation after a reducer with low-performance sensors, a second source may be configured for that purpose with:

motor.output.reference_source

The “reference source” will be consulted only at system power on after it is valid, in order to resolve the ambiguity resulting from the reducer. It can also be used if the output is incremental, but another absolute source is present that is lower quality or lower rate, to reference the output at power on.

Application

There are no configurable values necessary to operate any of the new I/O system from the application level. There are new registers that can be used to read the position and velocity from each of the sources, whether or not they are configured for any sinks. Similarly, the digital input, digital output, and analog inputs can all be operated from the register or diagnostic protocol. All of these can be seen in the reference documentation.