Motors: Motor Testing

[dsouzadakota]

Objective:
Complete motor testing plan.

Task:

• Record your results from the tests in the motor test plan document (which should follow design documentation template).
• ALWAYS include troubleshooting steps taken to overcome issues faced during testing.
• Be sure to test power supplies (V and I) before using them with the motors

EDIT:

• Before you plan to test pease let us know what materials you require and when you will be meeting IN ADVANCE so we can access components (adapters, power supplies) for you in advance.

[deshpr3]

Fri Mar 7:

• Ran into network issues when downloading debian packages onto the Rasberry pi
• Solution: Use elec-sensors troubleshooting documentation for proper network connection for Pi
• Successfully created 1 Modbus RTU connection from pi to motor
• Unable to send torque commands over Modbus RTU to pi

Mon Mar 10:

• Fix Motor control script to enable torque control mode for 5 seconds across all 4 motors at same time

[dsouzadakota]

@deshpr3 do you know why the torque control wasn't working?

[deshpr3]

When we attempted to enable torque profile mode, we got the following error:
Failed to set Torque Profile Mode : Connection timed out

Potential causes for error:

1. I might have used an incorrect slave_id to reference the motor (Fix: Send modbus command to a broadcast address)
2. The user manual expects the data format to have an even parity bit (parity bit is used for error checking). I didn't realize this and set the parity bit to be None

I've updated the code on github to account for both cases. Could be something else entirely, but we'll find out on Monday.

[deshpr3]

Mon Mar 10:

• We were able to set the motor into Torque Profile Mode by using the Motor control script!
• There was an error in the script so the motor didn't run for 5 seconds. We know how to fix the error but due to the Wifi, we had trouble logging back into the pi

Next Steps:

• scp updated Motor control script onto the pi and run the script