Help setting up GUI tools & EMI issues

Support
1

After taking a fairly long break I’m back trying to get my ODrive 3.6 running. I’m stuck in a few places and looking for suggestions.

Firstly, I use to use ODrive GUI beta and Liveplotter in an attempt to tune my system. I was never successful at tuning my last go around but at least the tools were working. Now that I’m revisiting this project it seems the tools don’t really seem to work anymore. After a lot of troubleshooting I’m closer to running GUI, but I can’t run odrive_servery.py directly or by launching the ODrive GUI exe (I’m on Windows).

I get an error:
odrive_server.py", line 293, in shutdown = fibre.Event() AttributeError: module ‘fibre’ has no attribute ‘Event’

I see a couple references to this in other posts but no resolution. Is there any way to still run ODrive GUI? It feels like the 3.6 boards and all of the relevant tools have been abandoned.

Next, I’m having huge issues with USB connectivity. I have tried braiding wires, 3 loops through a ferrite core, repositioning components, different USB hub, different USB cables, and I can’t get a connection that’s stable for any significant time even for testing purposes. I can calibrate but as soon as I go into position control I lose connection. A few days ago I had a connection stable enough to test for a min or two but today I lose the Odrive as soon as it goes to position control so I can’t do basic tuning or anything. As I understand my best solution would be to move to CAN. Any other suggestions or is CAN really my only option to possibly make this viable? It feels like a dumb question, but can I even run plotting tools and tune if I can only connect via CAN?

Ultimately for my project (motion simulator) I need to connect to another program that’s outputting position data. It was easy to format that program’s output appropriately for the ASCII protocol. Moving to CAN seems to imply that I now need to write an application that will translate the output of the other program into CAN messages. Is that right or are there tools that I have missed that would let me take ASCII protocol inputs and convert it to CAN messages? The serial interface was just so easy to connect to and CAN seems pretty daunting.

Any nudges in the right direction would be appreciated.
Thanks

2

The 3.6 GUI was only ever in Beta, and is not supported. It should still work with old versions of odrivetool though

For USB, are you putting the ferrites on the motor wires and / or the DC+/- power supply wires? That’s where they should be, not the USB cable. Additionally, proper grounding seems to make a big difference.

CAN is definitely a step up in complexity but it is much more reliable. There are a lot of people on the forum and the discord who are using CAN with simulators, so you shouldn’t have to write anything yourself.