Connection guide

Connecting the power

Connect the power the one of the pico-2 connectors (any one of the two available ones)

Once the power is connected, the actuator will start its initialisation procedure. Here is the video of it.

Once it is done it will show a green led light showing that it is ready to be used, otherwise it will show a red led light if there is an error. See more info about the led lights here.

Connecting the ethercat cable

Then we can connect the ethercat cable (to any of the two connectors available).

And you should be ready to go.

Simple test

If you have the ethercat stack installed on your computer you can check if the actuator is connected by running the command ethercat slaves in the terminal. The command will show the list of connected slaves and the status of each one of them. If the actuator (ex. name: RightWristOrbita3d) is connected it should show something like this:

$ ethercat slaves

0  0:0  PREOP  +  RightWristOrbita3d

Then if you have the package installed from source, you can run a simple test to check if the actuator is working properly using the code examples poulpe3d:

RUST_LOG=info cargo run --release --example poulpe3d -- --start-server

Otehrwise you can use the python bindings to connect to the actuator and do the same test:

import numpy as np
import time
from poulpe_ethercat_py import PyEthercatServer
from orbita3d import Orbita3dController

# Start the EtherCAT master
server = PyEthercatServer()
server.launch_server("path/to/ethercat_config.yaml")
# give some time for the master to start
time.sleep(1)


# connect to the actuator
orbita = Orbita3dController.from_config("path/to/orbita3d_config.yaml")

# enable the actuator
orbita.enable_torque()

# do a simple sinusoidal movement of the actuator
t0 = time.time()
while time.time() - t0 < 15:
    yaw = np.deg2rad(20) * np.sin(2 * np.pi * 0.15 * time.time())
    orbita.set_target_rpy_orientation((0.0, 0.0, yaw))
    time.sleep(0.001)

# disable the actuator
orbita.disable_torque()

ethercat:
  master_id: 0
  cycle_time_us: 1000 # us - cycle time of the ethercat 1/frequency
  command_drop_time_us: 5000 # us (5ms default) 
  watchdog_timeout_ms: 500 # ms (500ms default)
  mailbox_wait_time_ms: 10000 #ms  (1s default)

io: !PoulpeEthercat
  url: http://127.0.0.1:50098
  #name: NeckOrbita3d # it will use the name if available (optional but recomended)
  id: 0 # otherwise it will use the id (optional)
disks:
  #zeros: !ZeroStartup
  zeros: !FirmwareZero
  reduction: 5.333333333333333333
kinematics_model:
  alpha: 0.9424777960769379 # 54 degrees
  gamma_min: 0.6981317007977318 # 40 degrees
  offset: 0.0
  beta: 1.5707963267948966 # 90 degrees
  gamma_max: 3.141592653589793 # 180 degrees
  passiv_arms_direct: true
inverted_axes:
  - false
  - false
  - false

Both of the examples will do a short sinusoidal movement of the orbita actuator around the yaw axis.