Tag Archives: windows

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

Native moteus tools for Windows

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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:

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.