[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [General] Inspexel - The swiss army knife for dynamixel servo motors

sgssgene ros.discourse at gmail.com
Tue Nov 6 23:43:03 UTC 2018



# Inspexel
**The swiss army knife for dynamixel servo motors**

We developed a new command line tool called inspexel (inspector dynamixel).
It has a support for dynamixel motors (MX, MX(2), X, Pro, AX) and can use protocol version 1 and 2 for communication.

### Detect motors
A single command will detect motors on the bus reads all their registers: `inspexel detect --read_all`.
It gives a nice overview over their state and how they deviate from the default value.
<img src='/uploads/ros/original/2X/5/5135fd2db8713e5dbc3bdf2dc6881f71e298d4f0.jpeg'>

### Map motors into filesystem
Another function, which can be used for scripting or just exploring a motors functionality is the fuse option. Calling `inspexel fuse` will map every register of the detected motors into the linux file system.
You can list all available motors with
```
  ls dynamixelFS/motors
```

To read a single register you can call
```
cat dynamixelFS/motors/0/register-by-name/Present\ Temperature
```

To set values to register
```
echo 60 > dynamixelFS/motors/0/register-by-name/Temperature\ Shutdown
```

### Motivation
This tools purpose is to have a command line tool to configure dynamixel motors. Dynamixel motors are being used in many robotic projects but it seems like some tooling around the is missing.
There exists the robotis tool RoboManager which only runs under Windows. There are also other projects like Mixcell (https://github.com/clebercoutof/mixcell) which brings some of the functionality to linux.
One big issues with these tools are that they have GUI which makes it hard to use them over ssh on remote computers. Also it is not possible to use them inside of scripts.

### Source
The Project is an open source software and can be found at https://github.com/gottliebtfreitag/inspexel/





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