Developing the moteus brushless servo controller has been a very long journey, and while it isn’t over yet I have a reached a significant milestone.  The first batch of production moteus controllers are now available for general purchase at mjbots.com and shipment worldwide for $119 USD each!

I’ll repeat some of the specifications here:

• 3 phase brushless FOC control
• 170 MHz 32bit STM32G4 microprocessor
• Voltage: 12-34V
• Peak phase current: 60A
• Dimensions: 46x53mm - CAD drawing in github
• Mass: 14.2g
• Communications: 5Mbps CAN-FD
• Control rate: 40kHz
• Open source firmware: https://github.com/mjbots/moteus

Simultaneously, I’ve got development kits available that give you everything you need to start developing software for the moteus controller out of the box: moteus r4.3 developer kit

First, a limited number of qdd100 servos are available for sale to beta testers!  Check them out at mjbots.com.

After building up the first set of qdd100 servos, I wanted to empirically measure their performance parameters.  Some astute commenters uncovered in my terrible juggling video, that I didn’t actually have any ground truth measure of torque with these actuators.  Given that the ultimate torque is a pretty useful performance metric, it’s a good thing to have a solid understanding of.

I’ve received my first production run of the fdcanusb CAN-FD USB adapters and they are up for sale at mjbots.com!

While this is necessary for interacting with the moteus controller, it is also a fine general purpose CAN-FD adapter.  At the moment, the USB interface is a platform independent line based serial one (Windows, Linux, MacOS).  It doesn’t yet interoperate with SocketCAN on linux, but hopefully that will be resolved in the not too distant future.

While gearing up to make some dev-kits followed by a pre-production run of the moteus servo mk2, I recently received a bunch of frameless rotors and stators.

As with the other custom items, I’ve got some spares of these for sale at shop.mjbots.com if you’re building along with me!  [UPDATE no longer!]

Now it’s time to start building some servos!

In my quest to create a more dynamic quadruped, I’ve started accumulating a lot of parts from bulk buys that could be reasonably useful to other hobbyists and experimenters.  To maybe make life easier for everyone, I’ve started up what may be the worlds ugliest online shop where you can buy some of these components.  For now, I have some bearings and custom gears that are useful when building servos for dynamic robots.