In the application we are developping for a client, we have equipped a farm-ng Amiga with our own navigation system (constraints from the client) and connected to the CAN bus. The control of the robot via the CAN bus works without major issue.
Nonetheless, I was wondering if it would be possible for us to also monitor the motors via the CAN bus. Indeed, the robot will be shipped in a remote location, it already happened that one of the motor driver failed due to water ingress, and we would be more confident if we could get a bit of data from the 4 motors directly (in the best world: rpm, torque, voltage, current, temperature).
I can see that some messages are already present in the RPDO but it is not clear to me what they correspond to, and where to find this information (the motor drivers can be configured in many ways and I am not sure what was done for the Amiga):
can1 18A [8] 03 00 6A 05 00 00 00 00
can1 18B [8] 03 00 6E 05 00 00 00 00
can1 18C [8] 03 00 6E 05 00 00 00 00
can1 18D [8] 03 00 6E 05 00 00 01 00
can1 20A [8] 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
can1 20B [8] 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
can1 20C [8] 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
can1 20D [8] 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Is there anyone who could explain what is encapsulated in these CAN messages and in which format?
some questions here… do you have an Intelligence Kit on your Amiga? There is a canbus/motor_state that have those messages decoded. We don’t have torque, but you can estimate it pretty acurately from the other ones.
No unfortunately, we use another computer provided with our client spraying payload, so we directly connect our computer to the Amiga dashboard through the CAN bus to drive it.
Correct me if I’m wrong but the source of the canbus/motor_state decoder code is not available on your github right? It’s precompiled on the Intelligence Kit?
So, developing something like this would likely require extra engineering time from our team here at farm-ng, and given how specific this is, we need to justify the cost with volume. Let’s do this… shoot me an email at support@farm-ng.com with the use case, customers expected, and I will contact our product team to start designing a collaboration/partnership proposal.
Ok, thank you, I understand your point. We’ll discuss it internaly and I keep you posted by email.
To be fair though, we already have an implementation so I am not sure it will be easy to justify the costs for extra developments. In the ideal case, I just needed to know the content (message and type) of what you configured in the drivers’ TPDO (for instance 18A [8] 03 00 6A 05 00 00 00 00) and we can parse it ourselves.