Security features

[matthieu-lapeyre]

During the Maker Faire, a Poppy motor has melted because it has reached an extremely high temperature.

We could of course run a safe primitive checking for temperature state but maybe there is another way, more low level, embedded in pypot avoiding to let a $250 motor broke it self just because user is stupid ? Maybe not ...

[pierre-rouanet]

Well, Dynamixel motors are supposed to already have a temperature limit (http://support.robotis.com/en/product/dynamixel/mx_series/mx-28.htm#Actuator_Address_0B).
By default, it should turn off the motor when it reaches this temperature. Maybe, we should first investigate why this mechanism is not functioning as we are expecting?
If it's due to a bad temperature sensor I'm afraid we won't be able to do much...

[matthieu-lapeyre]

I think it is more because we somehow turn off this alert no ?

[pierre-rouanet]

As far as I know, pypot do not turn off any alarm.

Yet, the dynamixel mechanism to turn on/off alarms is rather unclear (and buggy?) In fact, I never manage to turn off any alarm. By default, I think the overheating and input voltage errors are set to shutdown the motor. I'm not quite sure how to test this without burning motors :-)

@SteveNguyen I think you had the same issue, right?

[matthieu-lapeyre]

In a previous pypot version, we set up the alarm config in the robot config file, does this still exists ?

[pierre-rouanet]

I do not remember this, maybe by digging in the commits... You can use this method to do it programatically.

Yet, as I told you it seems to have no effect.

[show0k]

This is now fix by poppy-project/poppy-humanoid#10. Do we should add the primitive in pypot for making it more accessible ?