6x BLDC / 3x ODrive Boards for Robot Arm project

Projects
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First, I’m a complete newbie regarding electronics, my weak point!
I have tested and can handle 6 steppers connected to external drivers (yes, it sucks for several reasons)
I see many demos interpolating two motors connected to the same ODrive and looks awesome, but will it be possible to run a 6DOF robot arm interpolating 6 BLDC motors at the same time? (any link to a demo would be awesome)
My idea is to run 6 BLDC motors connected to three ODrive boards from an arduino mega… will someone let me trow away the steppers solution?
Thanks!

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Marinoter, you definitely can do a 6DOF arm with 3 ODrives.

Although it is not a 6DOF arm, I would check out James Bruton’s openDog Robot. He is doing something similar as far as the inverse kinematics are concerned, as well as using an Arduino Mega to communicate to multiple odrives at the same time.

Here is a link to where he is hooking up and explaining the electronics of his project.

wayneStock

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Thanks a lot! Opens a light in my project!

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I doubt mega has enough power for 6 axis kinematics but Teensy 3.6(which Bruton uses) does. The odrives themselves don’t calculate the kinematics, the MCU does that.

I suggest you look up other stuff Bruton has made about OpenDog and other robots, he has some good information on microcontrollers and robotics related stuff. Though I must warn you that 6 axis kinematics are a really complicated topic after you move past the moving individual joints stage(with singularities and pose selection). Im also working on an industrial type robot arm and the control software is no joke, you hardly find anything that’s not commercial and in the 5 figures.