Customisation of New ODrive Generation

[jbombastor]

@madcowswe

Maybe if we had a ton of contributors that may be true. But it’s ~0, so the bug reports are the same (users report bugs on the product they use), and the fixes are just us fixing it, so it’s also the same in general.

This is a chicken and egg problem, and it’s why I kept going on about marketing and significant changes of approach.

@madcowswe

We will continue making it for as long as we can find chips for it, which is unfortunately getting difficult.

This is good to know, thank you.

[mwasplund]

Sorry to resurrect this old thread, but I wanted to weigh in with the perspective of someone new to robotics. I have a background in CS and CE and have worked 13 years in consumer software. My primary goal with robotics is to learn more of the hardware side while applying my software knowledge. I have been spending a lot of time learning about FOC and BL motor control while watching countless videos that showcase ODrive actuator designs. I was excited to dig in and order a controller and motor kit from your site as a starting point. The driving force being the assumption that O stands for Open Source, which means I can trust the community to get me up and running with the option to augment/hack and learn by looking under the hood. I was disappointed when I saw this thread (which was the first and only location that clearly says the new drivers are closed source) and will be reevaluating my decision to order an ODrive kit. I say this not to be cruel, but to highlight my decision making process to call out one anecdotal sample of a user that was swayed by the OS nature of the project.

I understand the age old issues with trying to productize an open source project, and only you have the the internal information to weigh the pros and cons of targeting a more consumer base. However, this is a clear transition from being a community project to a company that creates a product. As others have called out above in jest, I also felt the name was disingenuous and should be changed. Over time more and more folks, like me, may see your project and decide to go with something cheap from china because this no longer has the pull of Open Source. I personally am willing to pay extra for an open source project to give back with the understanding that part of that cost is the ability to look at the internals.

I say all of this because this is a great project, and I wish you the best of luck! I only wanted to provide one more perspective as a student of robotics leveraging OS projects to learn.