Tag Archives: devkit

Native moteus tools for Windows

2020-11-24robotsbazel, c++, devkit, moteus, windowsJosh Pieper

To date, all of the development tools for the moteus brushless controller have been available exclusively for Linux based operating systems. I’ve been doing some behind the scenes work, and have gotten to the point where moteus_tool now runs natively on windows and can communicate with moteus controllers using a fdcanusb.

Check out the Windows installer for the latest release:

moteus_host_tools_0.1.2020.1106.msi

To make this work, I started from the excellent grailbio/bazel-toolchain, which provides LLVM toolchains for Linux based systems based on the official LLVM pre-compiled binaries. I forked that into mjbots/bazel-toolchain and added Windows support. It isn’t perfect, because the LLVM project only distributes Windows binaries in installer form, and it isn’t possible to extract binaries from them without specialized tooling. So, this version relies on a manually re-packed compressed archive of all the executables.

I also added support for building the libc++ standard library, and using that instead of the MSVC standard library. This let me get c++20 coroutines working with clang on Windows.

All put together, the porting was pretty painless after having a toolchain in place. Just a few #if’s here and there, and I had to write a custom Windows specific console stream, as stdio and stderr do not support asynchronous completion ports on Windows.

Building the moteus controller dev kits

2020-01-29robotsbuild, devkit, moteus, moteus_r42Josh Pieper

As mentioned previously, I’m releasing moteus controller development kits to a few lucky beta testers. Building these wasn’t too hard, but was my first foray into low-volume production for someone who wasn’t myself. Here are a few pictures of the build:

A big thanks to all the beta testers! With the next revision of the controller, I’ll continue to have a development kit with roughly the same properties for those wishing to get started in an easy way.

If you have devkit envy, you can get a little fix watching this video showing how to set it up and use it.

Moteus controller devkit PCBs in house

2020-01-15robotsdevkit, moteus, moteus_r4, pcb, servoJosh Pieper

Update 2020-01-15: All the development kit slots are full. Thanks for your interest!

I’ve now received all the supplies I need to make up development kits for the moteus controller and to make a test quadruped!

I’m planning on making a few development kits from this production run so others can experiment with the moteus brushless controllers. Some people have already expressed interest in getting one — you have hopefully been contacted earlier. If you are interested in getting an opportunity to buy an early access kit and haven’t heard from me yet, fill out this form!

moteus controller beta test

I expect the development kits to clock in at $199, and include everything you need to power and communicate with the moteus controller, as well as a brushless motor to test with.