I introduced the fdcanusb previously, now I’ll describe some of the process and challenges in getting it to work.

Hardware

My initial challenges were around the PCB design and manufacturing.  To begin with, my very first revision was sent out for manufacturing with the same incorrect pinout as the moteus controller r4.0 and thus was only really usable as a paperweight.  Second, the supply of STM32G474 chips seems to be spotty now, so for r2 I had to scavenge chips from the boards that had broken pinouts.

The r2 boards did have a DB9 pinout that was not industry standard, this time due to Eagle’s DB9 footprint being broken, but that will be easy enough to fix in r2.1.

Software

The software had three things that needed to work, FDCAN, USB, and the finally all the glue logic.  Getting FDCAN to work was remarkably easy:  I just used the STM HAL APIs and was basically done.

USB was harder.  The last time I made a virtual serial port for the STM32, the mjmech gimbal board, I used the STM provided CDC libraries.  However, those are released only under a rather restrictive license, confusingly named the “Ultimate Liberty Software License Agreement”.  Despite the claims in the title, you actually have very little liberty, in that the software can only be used on STM controllers and has notice provisions as well.  As with the rest of the moteus universe, I wanted to be able to release this firmware under a permissive license so needed to look elsewhere.

Github and google found a number of candidates, and the one that I ended up starting from was dmitrystu/libusb_stm32.  It was already licensed under the Apache 2.0, and supported controllers which looked like they would be very similar to the STM32G4.  Sure enough, the STM32L433 has an identical USB peripheral and was already supported.

I ended up forking that repository into the fdcanusb one and modifying it slightly to be usable with C++ and mbed.  Also, interestingly, the CDC demo used the same endpoint for RX and TX, which the linux drivers didn’t seem to like so I just gave them separate endpoints like I’ve done before.  I then implemented a wrapper for the CDC class which presents the same asynchronous serial interface as everything else in mjbots/mjlib and was set to go.

The final piece of the software was all the glue and application logic.  I just used PersistentConfig and CommandManager from mjlib, which gave a human readable ASCII interface out of the box.  Then I wrote up the application logic in CanManager, which didn’t have to do much at this point.

Next steps

In its current state, the fdcanusb firmware is capable of communicating with the moteus r4.X series controllers just fine.  Next I’ll get a few more made to distribute with moteus development kits and see if there is any more demand for them.