I have a rudimentary understanding that the farm-ng architecture uses the Bafang Electric Wheelbarrow hub motor found here
and that the wire coming out of the wheel is a z910 connector that connects to the Baserunner_Z9 motor controller
i plan to buy 4 bike forks and hack together your physical platform with some EMT pipe.
how would i begin to do some hello world programming?
should i get the microcontroller kit you sell?
So from the microcontroller kit i can make the motors turn? does this communication happen over the “CAN bus” whatever that is? and would i have everything i need to do this hello world of making the structure move forward?
Ohhh of course id need a battery. I have 2 ebike batteries from bosche. Bosch Powerpack 400
https://www.rei.com/product/181982/bosch-powerpack-400-frame-battery
Or would i need to get a battery more compatible with Baserunner_Z9 motor controller like the Phaserunner at
does the Micro Controller kit you sell also directly connect to these powersource also?
Hey Juan,
you are right… the hub motors are similar to the ones you mentioned, although given our scale, we have the manufacturer to do changes on its configuration.
As a motor controller, we use a different one that communicate via our CAN bus. I would say using a motor controller similar to ours is not cost effective without scale, once you have to purchase the software to update its configurations and firmware straight from the manufacturer and it is not available to final customers, AFAIK.
The control HMI is a dashboard that orchestrate the motors. It actually uses a microcontroller similar to what we use in our Microcontroller kit, but with added circuitry and a touch display. It also uses a proprietary firmware is update via OTA or cable.
All in all, my opinion is: if you are building a robot from scratch, using our equipment would be not cost effective. They are all designed to work seamlessly with our hardware and software, but when working outside of our ecosystem, these design choices would mean less flexibility, therefore not suitable for prototyping.
so i went to the code in github. and after reading about your architecture I see there are some proto files in there. Im guessing thats the GRPC interface files. so long story short farm-ng doesnt make available ( to me ) the whole source code of all the software on the robot. youve basically only provided some interface files to the API and some examples that use that API. what i was looking for was the actual code that runs on the different computers on the robot itself so i could study it. that includes the ros packages. as well as the GRPC server side code. and anything else server side i would need to install an entire robot myself. is this correct?
to reiterate… i would like to download and play around with all the code that i would need to have if i were to take a barebones just physical machine connected to power and take that all the way to a running robot running the services and everything
for example like the code that actually listens on the can bus or the code that actually implements the skid steering
or for example the actual UI code of the dashboard or the UI of the brain
You are right… We expose multiple APIs to interact with the our robot, but not the lower level code. The reasons are safety and, of course, intelectual property. But most importantly, the idea of using a platform like ours is to be able to build applications without having to deal with the complexity of putting together a whole system.
If you want to have the experience of building the system from the ground up, it will be way more cost effective to purchase parts separately and build you own robot.