If anyone does want to play with closed loop motor control,

If anyone does want to play with closed loop motor control, this thing might be an idea and it is open source according to their page.

nm

@Mike_Kelly_Mike_Make because it reduces costs and risks for him

It looks very interesting. I might be willing to buy a driver and motor to try it.

@Mike_Kelly_Mike_Make ​ instead of editing the post, can you just post another comment so I can see what question @Sebastian_Schmidt ​ was answering?

@Justin_Nesselrotte he was asking why all those projects are on crowd funding.

If anyone gets an update on this or gets to try one out, please let us know.

@Justin_Nesselrotte My question was a snarky 'Why are these always crowd funded" to which the obvious answer is “because the project is tenuous and full of risk. Thus the creator, lacking investment funds, pushes the risk to “beta” testers who most likely think they’re getting a finished product”

I’d like to buy one of these to test, but not willing to wait for kickstarters inconsistent timeline. I guess we’ll see if this makes it to sale. Otherwise I might just buy some mechaduinos to test since those are finally available.

@Mike_Kelly_Mike_Make ​ I try and think of it as more distributing potential losses, as it’s generally the idea that it’s easier for 20 people to lose $5 than for one person to lose $100.

@Justin_Nesselrotte I get that and in some regards that’s fine. I did a Kickstarter before and in general the users get it. But some people don’t understand the risk they’re taking or that they’re not getting a final product.

I just noticed this one doesn’t even have an encoder like the mechaduino. It’s just a converter board assuming you have an encoded stepper it turns it into a servo.

It would be nice to know what type of position coding he is using. It is possible to use the drive circuit to determine how many cycles the motor went through, but I do not know if that is what the person is using or what.

Oh. In the manufacturing plan section of the page, it mentions 24V 5A motors. I think it ships with motors and encoder. If you look in the service motor section, it specifies a fine detail encoder with over 1000 positions per rotation.