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Tell us about your plans for Odrive!
Hello! My name is Luke. I’m 35 years old.
I am from Northern Wisconsin.
I’m in IT security by day, and I moonlight as a mechanical design student and machinist / inventor.
I have roughly 8 years of experience in electronics manufacturing services where I wore nearly every possible hat, often more than one at a time.
I’ve worked in EMS machine maintenance, programming and operations oversight of a leaded and lead free surface mount pick and place line. I also have extensive experience in the same areas with regard to; axial and radial insertion, selective, hot bar, wave and hand soldering.
I hand developed the final product assembly line that produces one of the most popular US made trail cameras available to the consumer and commercial markets. This box build line continues to produce completely assembled cameras ready to ship to the customer with an average return rate of under 0.2% through the use of poka-yoke mentality.
I plan to make a 3 axis Cartesian vertical mill with Odrive.
Specifically I would like to develop Odrive for use as a spindle controller.
Even more specific, an intelligent power feed. One that is aware of the torque limits of the tool it is working with, so it might prevent, for example, broken taps.
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Hey there!
My name is Oskar Weigl, and I’m the original developer of the ODrive.
I am from Sweden, but I haven’t lived in Sweden for the past 7 years.
I did my university in London, where I was heavily involved in the Imperial College Robotics Society. During my time there I worked on all kinds of projects, like this LED screen, this Eurobot robot, and an indoor SLAM quadrotor. Me and a friend also made PiFM which got quite popular back in the day.
The early beginnings of ODrive started with my final year project, which was called Brushless Servo Drive With Energy Storage. Here I made my own motor controller, and explored how regenerative braking could be used to save energy in industrial equipment.
After uni, I worked at a hybrid electric vehicles RnD company called Frazer Nash Research, where I was working on modelling and control of electric motors. One of the projects I particularly liked was when I did the full stack design and implementation of a 7kW motor controller for auxillary vehicle functions, like powering an air conditioning compressor. It was great to get to do all of it, the modelling, PCB, power electronics, software, and testing.
Unsurprisingly, it helped out a lot when I was simultaneously making ODrive v2 in my spare time.
My most recent job has been with the Swiss-Japanese company Rapyuta Robotics (and yes I did get the opportunity to work both in Zurich and Tokyo 
). They are a cloud robotics start-up, that aims to make robots more intelligent and more useful by connecting them to the internet and specifically to cloud services. Additional to the cloud platform, they have a product that is a fully autonomous camera drone, the purpose of which is to demonstrate the cloud features.
My work was focused on this drone product, and with it I have been working of a multitude of different robotics problems. Some of them were:
- Model based design tools for identifying system parameters and optimising control systems.
- Embedded control and estimation software that forms the drone autopilot.
- Tools to automatically generate embedded firmware code that implements Extended Kalman Filter state estimators from a specification in mathematical symbolic form.
- Sensor characterisation and analysis to tune the autopilot state estimator.
- Design and implementation of a camera gimbal controller.
Working at Rapyuta was really fun and interesting. However, since they were a start-up, and like in most startups, the early employees work really hard to ensure the success of the company, it meant that I had very little time to keep working on ODrive in my spare time. With all of the very encouraging feedback from the community, I finally decided to quit and pursue ODrive full time!
So that’s what I’m very excited to be doing: to vastly accelerate the development rate of ODrive, and build a community around it. I want to get ODrive into the hands of people building real projects, listen to their feedback, and keep building a great product!
With that I would like to thank everyone for the very encouraging support and both constructive and positive feedback I have received. Without you this would not be possible!
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Hello to Luke and Oskar above. I am Josh,
I am a Roboticist in London and have had the pleasure of seeing this project up close since its inception. Whilst I am not currently working on a project that *requires Odrive, I do sincerely think there is a market for a simple community driven alternative to the stepper motor and hobby servos. I look forward to seeing the creations!
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Hi all,
I’m Brendan. First of all thanks to Oskar for the great product, I hope to be able to make a contribution. The main reason I bought an ODrive is to learn more about servos. Steppers are not the solution to every problem, and so I would like to be able to apply servos when appropriate.
My goal is to use the ODrive to convert my lathe to CNC. ODrive has a number of features I like:
- By using belt drives and toothed gears mounted on the hand controls, the lathe could still be operated by hand for jobs that don’t require CNC. Unlike, steppers, servos still spin when powered on. Why not just use steppers that are powered off you ask? Well…
- Unlike steppers, servos require encoders for closed loop control. The encoders (I hope) can also be used to record the motion of the controls and (with some help) convert the output to GCode. This would then allow the servos to make duplicates of a part turned by hand.
There are some other things but these will be first. It’s not a small project, but open source makes it possible, so thanks again to Oskar for that. Of course, to start it will simply be getting the servos to spin at various speeds and/or distances, reading encoder outputs etc. and building from there.
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Hello, I am wanting to drive some 70mm gimbal motors for robotic locomotion and knew the available drivers were not what I wanted so I had just started a layout with DRV8305 drivers (and an atmel cpu) when a friend mentioned this project. Perfect. Im looking to use AMS encoders for position feedback, possibly off centre ones with a multipole magnetic ring., 40 poles x 40 count per pole from what I remember. Also will need to re-wind the gimbal motors for high current. Looking for position and torque control rather than speed.
Sounds like some great cnc projects also, Ive just bought a beaver mill to cut the weight off the gimbal motors. Just ordered a V3,2, Great project, Thanks. Looking forward to some ST , IAR EWARM.
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Hi
I’m Toon (Belgium). I own a small web/app development company AppSaloon.
I like to create, make, program. I like electronics, 3D printing, …
I got interesed into the ODrive because I have a lot of stuff running on stepper motors like a 3D printer, Desktop cnc, small laser engraver and 2 art installations. Since the 2 art installations are running at high speed, steppers lose position and are not fast enough.
Installation 1 is a big 2 meter diameter full rotation SCARA arm that writes with light in the air. Although it has big nema 34 stepper motors and super lightweight carbon fiber tube arms the big momentum of 1m arm is causing to much issues. A closed loop system would be the beter option. And I’m ready for Version 2 anyway.
Installation 2 is already a version 2 from my soundwave printer project , but this time I’m going to put in on a linear rail and draw 1 meter of soundwave in the air at the highest possible speed (> 1m/s). I tried steppers, DC motors and BLDC’s. Wrote my not so successful firmware for a BLDC controller hence my interessed in ODrive to see how it should be done.
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Hi,
My name is Jan from Germany.
My main interests from hobby side are with respect to 3d printing and robotics in general.
I am currently building a Core XY printer to replace my current custom made printer which definitly lacks precise dynamics ;).
I was following the uprising projects in motion control with interest (like e.g. mechaduino) but am more convinced by the Odrive approach which I plan to use as a driving stage to the XY stage of the new printer. However thinking of the possibilities many more things come to my mind especially for driving robot arms with decent payload.
In my profession I am development engineer for large scale composite parts and their industrialization, so there are some coincedences and interests as well in these developments but so far for large scale application “traditional approaches” are currently maintained for many reasons. However paradigms are shifting and at some point I am sure also more progressive are going to be applied to further improve productivity.
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Howdy,
I guess I had better introduce myself as well.
My name is Bart (really). I live in Southfield Michigan, that is just north of Detroit the burbs I guess. I was in the USAF from 1980 to 1984. I was in for 4 years and 11 seconds. 
I was a Weapons Tech (462) on F15 aircraft. When I got out I played in Rock & Roll bands, Roadie for a couple of others and bar tended, It’s amazing I made it through the 80s. I was a service manager for a copier repair company and worked for the Infamous Arthur Anderen (the CPA firm for Enron.) I got into PCB design in the early 90s, That is what I have been doing ever since. I did spend a couple of years in Egypt working on a Russian SAM III system Integrating a Flir and Laser. I have some stories about that time. I now work for Denso International Americas Michigan where I work on Instrument Clusters and Climate Control Modules for The automotive industry. Now as a hobby I work on anything that has motion control. I have built several 3D printers and have a bad ass CNC router that I upgraded and 2 laser cutters. I am really excited about the Odrive and I think it will fill a needed gap in motion control.
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Hi,
My name is Florenç and I am a young engineer.
Currently I work on a robotics project in a french laboratory. Our robot needs BLDC motors with current and position control. So with my team we decided to work with the Odrive.
Hello!
My name is Eric, and I’m a High School Junior from the Philadelphia suburbs. An avid competitive robotics participant, I like C/C++ programming and controling stuff.
I saw this project and thought it was cool, so I joined.
Hi,
My name is Andrew from London UK / Boston USA. I met Oskar at the London hardware startup meetup and we had a nice chat about the ideas behind ODrive. I’m really excited to see how much progress has been made since then. I run a company called CircuitHub that has been helping to fab the ODrive circuit boards. We are also working on custom robotics so I’m interested in using ODrive for some internal applications.
Cheers 
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Hi,
my name is Neil, I work for a company in Macclesfield, UK. We develop products for the textile industry. We have a product which is currently being updated and have chosen to use the ODrive.
Hello!
My name is Tim and I want to make some stuff ^^.
I’m from Germany and short before the final exam of mechanical engineering.
Somehow I got into electronics and programming but that’s just a hobby.
I’ve some ideas for products which I wold love to materialize, if I can manage to do it.