Firmware Rescope Meeting 11/13/2022

Owned by Austin Tailon Huang
Nov 13, 2022
2 min read

Participants

  • Wolfgang Windholtz

  • Austin Huang

  • Keyon Jerome

  • Nicholas Palmer

  • Ari Wasch

SparkMax Motor Controllers

  • Need to make sure encoders are natively supported by the sparkmax controller

  • can control 24V; probably need to switch to 24V motors

  • it might be possible to make the 24V signal into 48V

    • not a very desirable solution

    • requires more parts to get working, more places it can fail

    • can potentially find a power amplifier

  • need to investigate how the brushless encoder works → is it just a hall sensor reader

  • Not an option - advice from Sahil

Encoder Gripper Validation

  • Get a natively supported relative encoder on the gripper and test ASAP

  • If we get this working with all control modes, next things to check are:

    • Get a natively supported odrive on a wheel motor, see if we can get full suite of controls working

    • Testing with RS422 board if above works ^

Motor Config Setup

  • Required to control an odrive.

  • Need the number of pole pairs, torque constant, current limit of motor, etc.

Switching To Brushed

Mechanical Concerns

  • Need to package brushed motors inside of the wheel hubs (designed to fit a specific motor type atm)

  • Need to package brushed motors into different arm joint configurations

  • Weight concerns

  • Torque/power performance concerns

  • Lead time / manufacturing concerns

Control Concerns

  • Cytrons do not have any closed loop feedback control → need an arm board to control the arm

  • Will still have to write firmware

Overall Next Steps

  • Main issue right now is time crunch. ODrives could work in theory, but we need more time

  • Test basic gripper validation to see if natively supported modes work

    • Refit encoders if this works

  • Talk to WARG to spin a basic motor → ask to borrow a high power ESC (and quick tutorial on how to use it)

  • Firmware Staffing

    • Ari may know somebody

    • Keyon may know people

    • Wolfgang may know people