Creator Motor Drivers

C++ drivers for Copley Controls amplifiers and Dongbu Robotics Herkulex motors

C++ applications to communicate with Copley Controls motor amplifiers controlling DC brushless (DCBL) motors, and Donbu Robotics Herkulex motors, over UART serial ports in Linux.

These drivers communicate to a bus master using a standard Linux serial port, such as /dev/tty0, and any other motors connected to the CAN bus of the UART amplifier.

Drivers are designed to be used in a synchronous, single-threaded environment, and methods are minimally blocking. Methods are provided to start motion and periodically poll the status. Low-level motor control, such as trajectory planning and detecting limit switches, are offloaded to the motor controller itself.

These drivers are user-space (and not kernel) and generally portable. We have tested these extensively in amd64 and armhf platforms.

This software is not designed to be used in real-time applications, but could presumably be adapted for them.

See drivers/copley/README.md for the Copley driver, and drivers/herkulex/README.md for the Herkulex driver.

Compile and Run Examples

Compile all code and examples

mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ../
make all

Run examples

# scan for all Copley amplifiers on a bus
./build/drivers/copley/examples/copley-scan

# connect to a Copley amplifier
./build/drivers/copley/examples/copley-example-amplifier

# scan for all Herkulex motors on a bus
./build/drivers/herkulex/examples/herkulex-scan

# connect to a Herkulex motor
./build/drivers/herkulex/examples/herkulex-example

Depending on your system, you may need to run these commands with root or sudo privileges.

Prerequesites

Compiling

• CMake 3.12 of later (tested through 3.23)
• gcc supporting c++11 or later (tested through c++20)
• boost 1.65 or later (tested through 1.71)

Runtime

• Linux (POSIX)

Authors

• Jeff C. Jensen (elgeeko1)
• Patrick Sherman (pdsherman-creator)
• Cam Bennett (cbennett24)