Tag Archives: rpi

New cross-platform moteus tools!

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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.

….

But wait, there’s more!

Now, both moteus_tool, tview, and the python bindings more generally can use python-can as a transport. That means tview can now be used with socketcan, pcan, and a bunch of other options. To one up that, most users won’t have to even specify any command line options, as tview and moteus tool will automatically select a fdcanusb or python-can depending upon what is available.

I’ll be updating the devkit introduction video soon, although the commands in there will largely continue working for the time being.

Errata

  • Neither pypi or piwheels has pyside2 for the Raspberry Pi, but it is packaged in Raspberry Pi OS. You can follow the instructions in git to find a recipe that works.
  • To use the pi3hat, you need to also do pip3 install moteus_pi3hat

Measuring the pi3hat r4.2 performance

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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.

pi3hat r4.2 available at mjbots.com

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.

Then, I could use pi3hat_tool incantations to experiment with different bus utilization strategies and get to one with the best performance. The sequence that I settled on was:

  1. Write all outgoing CAN messages, using a round-robin strategy between CAN buses. The SPI bus rate of 10Mhz is faster than the 5Mbps maximum CAN-FD rate, so this gets each bus transmitting its first packet as soon as possible, then queues up the remainder.
  2. Read the IMU. During this phase, any replies over CAN are being enqueued on the individual STM32 processors.
  3. Optionally read CAN replies. If any outgoing packets were marked as expecting a reply, that bus is expected to receive the appropriate number of responses. Additionally, a bus can be requested to “get anything in the queue”.

With this approach, a full command and query of the comprehensive state of 12 qdd100 servos, and reading the IMU takes around 740us. If you perform that on one thread while performing robot control on others, it allows you to achieve a 1kHz update rate.

CAN1 SPI clock on bottom, CAN1 and CAN3 bus on top

These results were with the Raspberry Pi 3b+. On a Raspberry Pi 4, they seem to be about 5% better, mostly because the Pi 4’s faster CPU is able to execute the register twiddling a little faster, which reduces dead time on the SPI bus.

Bringing up the pi3hat r4.2

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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:

It consists of a single C++11 header and source file with no dependencies aside from the standard C++ library and bcm_host.h from the Raspberry Pi firmware. You can build it using the bazel build files, or just copy the source file into your own project and build with whatever system you are using.

Performance

Using all of the pi3hat’s features in a runtime performant way can be challenging, but libpi3hat makes it not so bad by providing an omnibus call which sequences accesses to all the CAN buses and peripherals in a way that maximizes pipelining and overlap between the different operations, while simultaneously maximizing the usage of the SPI bus. The downside is that it does not use the linux kernel drivers for SPI and thus requires root access to run. For most robotic applications, that isn’t a problem, as the controlling computer is doing nothing but control anyways.

This design makes it feasible to operate at least 12 servos and read the IMU at rates over 1kHz on a Raspberry Pi.

pi3hat_tool

There is a command line tool, pi3hat_tool which provides a demonstration of how to use all the features of the library, as well as being a useful diagnostic tool on its own. For instance, it can be used to read the IMU state:

# ./pi3hat_tool --read-att
ATT w=0.999 x=0.013 y=-0.006 z=-0.029  dps=(  0.1, -0.1, -0.1) a=( 0.0, 0.0, 0.0)

And it can be used to write and read from the various CAN buses. 

# ./pi3hat_tool --write-can 1,8001,1300,r \
                --write-can 2,8004,1300,r \
                --write-can 3,8007,1300,r
CAN 1,100,2300000400
CAN 2,400,2300000400
CAN 3,700,230000fc00

You can also do those at the same time in a single bus cycle:

# ./pi3hat_tool --read-att --write-can 1,8001,1300,r
CAN 1,100,2300000400
ATT w=0.183 x=0.692 y=0.181 z=-0.674  dps=(  0.1, -0.0,  0.1) a=(-0.0, 0.0,-0.0)

Next steps

Next up I’ll demonstrate my performance testing setup, and what kind of performance you can expect in a typical system.

New product Monday: pi3hat

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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.

Finally, as is customary with these boards, I made a video “getting started” guide:

Raspberry Pi 4

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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+.

The now somewhat misnamed “pi3hat” worked just fine with the pi4, with some minor changes to the software to support the new peripheral base address from the bcm2711 SoC in the Pi 4.

Yes, you can see the USB3 ports there

Primitive turret automatic tracking

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Continuing in my series of developments with the Mech Warfare turret, I’ve now managed to replicate the primitive target tracking functionality I had in the v2 version of the turret.  This works using a pretty simple principle:

  • raspicam is used to read the raspberry pi camera
  • ArUco is used to find any fiducials in view
  • The target closest to the center is deemed, the “active target”
  • The pitch and yaw rate are set based on a simple P controller to bring that target to a known point

This works passably, as shown in the video below:

In this architecture, I have a lot of room to improve the performance, both in terms of range and tracking stability.  We’ll see what I can come up in future work.

 

quad A1 chassis updates

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I finally got around to fixing a number of minor glitches in the quad A1’s chassis recently.

1. The raspberry pi is now far enough away from the left panel that you can connect the HDMI if you choose.

20200506-rpi_mounting

2. I no longer have vestigal studs for the pre quad A0 junction board on the other side.

20200506-power_dist

3. The switch got moved down to between the legs.

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4. So that the entire top surface can be used for mounting things if necessary (note the additional inserts at 160mm diameter).

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5. And finally I added a shielding on the inside to cover up the guts on the left and right side.

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Nothing too significant, but I had a running list and it was getting long enough that I figured it made sense to finally knock them off.

 

Programming and testing moteus controllers

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Like with the fdcanusb, I built a programming and test fixture for the moteus controllers.  The basic setup is similar to the fdcanusb.  I have a raspberry pi with a touchscreen connected via USB to a number of peripherals.  In this case, there is a STM32 programmer, a fdcanusb, and a label printer.  Here though, unlike with the fdcanusb fixture, I wanted to be able to test the drive stage of the controllers and the encoders too.

My solution was to create a mechanical fixture that each board slots onto, with pogo pins that connect to test points for the phase outputs.

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While it doesn’t make as good a connection as the solder through holes normally used to connect a motor, it is good enough to verify that the controller works.  As a side-bonus, it also makes it trivial to test that the absolute magnetic encoder works properly.

This video shows how the programming and testing process works, and walks through testing a few boards.

Turret active inertial stabilization

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This post will be short, because it is just re-implementing the functionality I had in my turrets version 1 and 2, but this time using the raspberry pi as the master controller and two moteus controllers on each gimbal axis.

I have the raspberry pi running the primary control loop at 400Hz.  At each time step it reads the IMU from the pi3 hat, and reads the current state of each servo (although it doesn’t actually use the servo state at the moment).  It then runs a simple PID control loop on each axis, aiming to achieve a desired position and rate, which results in a torque command that is sent to each servo.  Here’s the video proof!