ODrive

Don’t @ me for the lighting Joey

This is the last sheet before you may proceed onto your senior year project! And perhaps it’s apt that it is the most frustrating of the sheets, even if it may seem short and sweet.

I’ll preface this by saying that the ODrives are a notoriously finnicky set of motor controllers. They’re really cool! And really powerful! But also frequently error out and spark issues, oftentimes seemingly for no reason. Take solace in the fact that you are not alone in your problems!

Mr. PZ has created a great, independent website here: https://dpengineering.github.io/dpea-odrive/ so go through the examples and challenges found for a great introduction to the ODrive ecosystem.

Note that you should be as careful as possible with these boards. They’re about 70 dollars a piece, and awfully fragile, so triple check your connections before turning anything on!

There’s also a cool leadscrew project that you can work on as a bonus challenge! Here, you learn to control a motor using an ODrive through a joystick. The cool part of that project is learning how to create soft limitations on your project – In this case, it’s smoothly slowing down and reversing the direction of a joystick as the user forces themselves to the boundary of your leadscrews.

Anyways, congratulations! You’ve completed the sheets, and are now ready to proceed to your senior year project! Best of luck moving forward: you got this. ❤️