My 4yo son watched this with me and now he can’t stop talking about how much smarter you are than me. Thanks a lot, jerk. In all seriousness - nice work. Can’t wait to see the final product.

"AC power is basically just really long distance regenerative braking."

Dude this stuff is my childhood dream. I hope you get it done and I'll sure try to help your channel with whatever I can

I've got two Motoman K30's (1995 era) running in production and its a nightmare trying to find Servo Drivers. Looking forward to moving this forward. The world definitely needs opensource 220V / 480V 20VA controllers!

Easiest way around fanuc encoders to find reliable and affordable drives I have found recently is to ditch the factory encoders and replace them with 16bit encoders from DMM Tech in Canada. I have a couple of fanuc redcap motors been laying in storage for years due to the high price tag to try and revive them. I took a chance and ordered some encoders from them together with their DYN 4 ac servo drives (200vac), and within a few hours I had the motors running like new ones. Hardest job was to make custom fitting plates to fit the encoders. They supply you with software to do the encoder alignment, no fiddling with scopes etc. Just wire it up, fill in a few parameters and if the motor phase connections are done correctly, you will have the motors spinning in minutes. I have no affiliation with them, just found it was the cheapest reliable option after digging for many years. Their online support are also top notch.

I have a Fanuc CNC mill from the year 2000. It regenerates when the axis decelerate. Makes the LED lights and GFCI outlets in my house whistle. Also I will totally buy that new driver you're building. Keep being awesome!

My buddy has a 7 axis robot we are trying to get running, so we will be following this closely! It's all DC servo with resolvers, and software will definitely be our shortfall.

I think the community missed the opportunity to hire you full time as this project is easily worth a salary.

Your motivation , persistence and desire to learn is awesome. I’d love to to quit my job and just do cool projects like this

It's rare that I listen to someone that grasps this so well. I will be watching and learning. Thanks for taking the time to make this video and share it! Mark

So happy to see an update. I've been working to build a controller for some old robots and am excited to see where this project will lead!

Great job, keep up the good work! I think an open source controller would be an excellent gateway into modern small-scale integration. It could lead to great cobots, research, or even hobby use for other platforms such as metal 3D printers and multi axis EDMs. Super cool!!!

Very cool project, as someone that programs CNC motion controllers I’d say you have a lot of work on your hands doing this alone. But I’d love to see you succeed

Great explanation of what your issues are and how you plan on solving them. Can’t wait for the next episode. Well done 👍

Lovely work! I really enjoy the progress you're making. Big ups!

Just an FYI, although I haven't demonstrated it with a FANUC protocol, I have managed to make the Raspberry Pi Pico poll encoders using the BiSS or Mitsubishi protocols. I can handle 8 BiSS encoders using the PIO hardware of the board. Probably not the best solution when compared to FPGAs but they are very cheap. Love what you're doing btw, keep it up. Greg

Hey man I work in the automation industry and do some of this stuff as a hobby as well. I am so impressed by this project. Can't wait to see more

I've always wanted to utilize an industrial robot but the ties to the manufacturers software and controllers has always been a deal breaker. Being able to utilize a robot without the stock controller is huge. I subbed to follow your journey. A finished product that could be used as you envision would be fantastic. Thanks for all your work.

This is some of the coolest stuff I’ve ever seen

This sounds like an incredibly interesting project. Can’t wait for more updates.

Excellent work! looking forward to seeing how it goes

This is an incredible undertaking! Subbed to see where this goes!

That's definitely an involved project. Love the idea of using the driver board for PFC

I love what you are doing. Subscribed. Keep up the good work. Your explanation of motor controllers and motion controllers was very good. Not many people understand this.

Man this is awesome. Good luck and keep up. I wish you the best of luck!!

I absolutely love your work and the Apache controller case Idea has been super helpful with my cnc project so I wanted to say thanks! And just out of curiosity, where did you learn how to do such cool deep-dives into the electronics? Thanks for the new post and keep up the good work! :D

You rock! Awesome series, thanks for uploading

Suggest you aim to include dual STO inputs on the motor controller. And set up the safety+motion controller to eventually support Safe stop 1 (SS1) - which is basically just a configurable delay before triggering STO. Have the motor controllers in charge of the brakes, and link that in to STO chain.

Awesome work! Most is over my head, but I love trying to understand.

You are legendary! It's my dream to have an arm of my own one day! Keep on making amazing content, you are an inspiration!

Really cool stuff, looking forward to the next episode!

Brilliant - keep going with this - love to see it move forward

This is great, glad to see a part two

This has been a very fun watch. I went through almost the exact same thing with a Unimate PUMA 560 robot I wanted to resurrect. Similar hardware encoder issues, similar starting again from scratch mid-way through situation... stay strong.

Super interesting project and looking forward to see how things progress. If you are looking for ways to simulate your robot and test out/tune your motion control there are a number of open-source versions of common tools used in industry, such as OpenModelica, Scilab, & others. They have somewhat of a learning curve but it's amazing how much control prototyping you can do with just a simulated model of your system and then fine tune with the real system once you have something working.

It was a struggle and a pleasure to keep up with what you were talking about! Awesome work! Subscribed, looking forward to what’s next

Really interesting and look forward to seeing more. Thank you.

Oh woah! he's back!

Looks like a robot out of the Body shop in a GM plant. :) I hope that you weren't hanging off of that robot while it was live...

I will support you so you can dedicate more time to these badass projects.

man this is pure gold, so underrated! Keet it up 🚀

I just discovered your channel thanks to yt magic. I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes and hope that you'll do so well that you can make this a full time gig!

I have used ROS (Robot Operating System) with the MoveIt program to control a custom robot arm. I never ended up finishing the project, but it wasnt to hard to get Moveit to work with my arm, and using ROS would make it potentially easier to setup the encoders and all the other control stuff.

What a wealth of information. Great work.

Low voltages caused by high resistance neg/gnd loops or voltage leaks causing positive gnd. Also, back emf can cause dropouts due to the control sigs not having enough disparity between VCC and GND(seen on the oscilloscope with the base voltage jump 4:52) Possibly Separate each GND from the motor/actuator from all other controllers

Excellent video! Thanks for sharing

Man... so much knowledge I'll never be able to get even close to. Even though there's a large Kuka sitting in the corner of my workshop collecting dust. Ex colleague bought it several years ago with such an outdated controller it doesn't even have USB. Anyway, never been able to make it work. Any chance to make it useful would be just incredible. Keep up the good work!

First time seeing one of your videos! Loved it & got a sub from me. Looking forward to watching the project grow

WOW, such a massive project for one guy alone, huh! I'm anxious for the next chapters! Keep this wonderful content, please.

Great to see another vid and this is absolutely awesome!, There is currently nothing out there quite like you have described, I will be following this project quite closely and wont have a problem supporting it via patreon or something. I was thinking about buying an old DMG 5 axis milling machine, that has control failures beyond reasonable repair and kind of experimenting with it, I think you project would be a great match and generally good testing for it. Thanks for sharing!

Truly Inspiring, I will follow all the steps.

I hope the drive goes well.

Super cool! The engineering department at my college has one of these and I never knew about all the intricacies involved with having it communicate with a computer.

Awesome work!

My guy, you're an absolute Wizz! God Bless!

You are a God sir if you successfully implement all of this into open-source. You are one of the most humble tubers around def rang the bell.

Excellent effort

Really impressive ! Your knowledge and drive (lack of a better pun right lol ! ) Is exciting !!! I run new Fanuc robots here and am doing some exciting new projects with them. Let us know when you get more of your design objectives running like the FPGA and controller board. Thanks so much. John

Interesting project! Re. the drive system, I'd suggest you break it down a bit, for each axis: A dual-loop speed servo, with the outer loop managing speed error and the inner loop managing motor drive current. Then separately, a position loop that compares instantaneous target position to actual position and gives the speed servo a signal directly proportional to that, limited to ~80% the maximum drive system speed capability (or whatever below that you consider safe). The G Code interpreter and path calculation system only update the target positions & the servo position system half makes the machine track that. That's how large machine tools typically work. Some also have an element of the path speed added in to the loop to reduce following error at higher feedrates, but that is very critical and can easily cause instability, so I'd suggest you use the pure "following error * fixed gain -> speed" setup. In a machine with good mechanics and low backlash, the gain constant is usually set to give 1mm following error at 1m/minute feed, on a linear axis. I'm not quite sure how that translates to rotary! The current loop section of the speed drive has an integrator (or PID), so the current (motor torque) adapts to the load without any significant change in following error. Position holding should be limited only by the motor capability and mechanical strength of the machine, at that. I spent a lot of time with the first system I designed (early 80s) trying different control strategies but it came down to the simple, linear, following error to velocity setup being the most effective and accurate. (The controller ran on an MC6809 at 2MHz, with resolver position feedback and Inland Motor TPAR analog / thyristor axis drives, on 10m and 5m Butler Elgamills, replacing dead bitslice CPU paper tape systems. They used all fixed-point maths except for the operator position display, and no trig at all, even for radius / circle interpolation).

Awesome work.

Awesome. You've given me hope for my Fanuc 100!

there's a good chance path blending is causing trouble, set g64 to p0.01 in your INI for the rs242 startup routine. The problem with the encoder handling within linuxcnc, is that it is not done by interupt, and I kinda went on a rant about it a few months ago. I have been working on porting EMC2 to OpenRTOS from TexasInstruments for use on their hardware. But dude, I don't have enough time. I think getting EMC off of linux is where I would start. Then with some work there's a way to fix the short coming of the control software. Keep me aprised though, I have some skills as a C programmer for state type logic and deep mechanical engineering skills.

This is like an upgraded crane, almost, but more mobile and smaller. Great work, would love to build one of these for myself and see what they do. Integration of large machines like this could eventually become a large exoskeleton like the AMP suit, or some sort of mech. Love to see what you're doing with this later, you've got a like and sub. Keep it up man. 👍

You are an absolute madlad! Awesome!

Been binging your channel and this upload got me all hyped to see it pop up lol thanks for making me want a robot arm now 😂

If you do need to desolder those mosfets at 13:18 , its not that hard to get them off in one go. Take a paperclip or similar thickness piece of uninsulated copper wire, and solder it to each of the through hole components legs with a big blob of solder. Then heat the wire up with a large soldering iron tip. The wire transfers the irons heat to each of the legs pretty equally, and you can just pull the component out from the other side of the board.

God this is outrageously cool...I'm more of a mechanical guy (cars/motorcycles/etc, just got a manual Bridgeport), but I'm also a software engineer and I've always been fascinated by the idea of using computers to run physical machines. Seeing this really gets my gears turning ;) Also, I've rarely seen someone with your level of knowledge talk about something this complex so clearly! Good on ya :)

Internet - do your thing. This would be so awesome to have a community around this project

This is a great thing you're working on. Well designed open source controller would be able to help revive tons of mechanically fine robots with dead electonics. If you'd like some FPGA support, let me know. regards, hypernyan

I love your videos my man

This is the way. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Well done on the effort so far!

I Love your vision! Keep it up, one more fan won right now! Greetings from Germany Julian

Out of nowhere: Lets rely on learning VHDL or Verilog and programming an FPGA just for fun and by the challenge to conclude a project ! There will be many nights over my friend, good luck

Hi german automation software developer for industrial robots here; I madly aprove. we need Open source Robot Controllers.

Love the video and just subscribed to you! Have you considered using a Centroid Oak board for the motion control? The board itself deals with all the motion controll even though it uses a PC to run it.

You are blowing my mind

Very nice video and super interesting project! Just one advise from my side, if you push the robot (like in 11:14) please have a deadman switch at hand, even if you are 99% sure that nothing can happen.

I love to innovate new things 🎉

That flexure pen mount looks cool

You are amazing

Man, You are crazy! I wish You luck.

Can't wait to see Rob (RO8) cutting some interesting stuff with its router spindle.

Amazing... I only wish I had spent my early EE days learning FPGAs... I don't think my instructors had a clue either. Great overall explanation of the state of options for controlling industrial robots.

A intresting thought , feed the signalns and movment to a neural network , and task to translate the signals of the decoders.

Thats seriosuly impressive i love that.. I want to build one in future

Have you seen the VESC Project? By far the best Open Source brushless motor Controller. Supports many encoders and protocols

I wanna see the faces of the people manufacture those robot arms when a single guy releases an open source controller for their million dollar robots.

Respect ! 👍

Wow That’s so cool

you work as a genius. but i think open source for industry robot is imposible. just the dream. thanks for your great work. waiting for your next content.

Good luck! I've stayed away from FPGAs because I just consider them above my pay grade. I'm not afraid to jump into unknown waters, but it's already hard enough learning how to write and debug embedded MCU code, not to mention motor control stuff.

this video makes me want to get back into this stuff. I joined the discord. my background is mechatronics. I ran a machine shop for 5 years. I know machining, best practice for design, and a little bit of general programming and about microcontrollers, but never took the dive into making my own boards. I always saw H Bridges and thought it was criminal how they were priced. It makes any hobby project relatively expensive (especially for people still in school who are interested in this sort of stuff like grade 12 through university).

So cool. Keep it up!

Good luck 👍

Great vid! Just wondering why you ditch the idea of using one micro per encoder? You can connect them to a network like can bus or Ethernet, I think you will get enough bandwidth and low enough latency.

This is fascinating

I work with a kuka 210 and do a lot of the direct maintenance of it, alongside the programming for milling with it. Loving the project, and if there's anything I can do to help, I'd love to.

your garage is the Bat Cave!!

First time here and already know where the channel name comes from, looking at the linear guide and block for the revised pen holder. 👍

I'm calling it Rob