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Maker Faire and Alpha Shipping Update

A project log for ODrive - High performance motor control

Hobby brushless motors are incredibly cheap and powerful. However we need a way to make robots out of them. ODrive is that way.

oskar-weiglOskar Weigl 05/28/2017 at 23:093 Comments

Maker Faire

Last week I was at the 2017 Bay Area Maker Faire. It was really fantastic to meet other people who are into building cool stuff. Thank you for all the praise, suggestions, interesting discussions and ideas!

Also, Juha Kuusama, the man behind the Liteplacer, flew over from Finland to hang out, and to help man the booth. Thank you!

Below are some pictures of the booth we managed to put together with a very last minute effort. Huge thanks to my girlfriend for all the help!

ODrive booth, shared with an unrelated exhibitor.

Left to Right: Hardware showcase (see next picture), newsletter signup laptop, handcrusher5000 (seriously, several people didn't take the hint from the acrylic shields).

Hardware showcase, top to bottom: Motors and encoder, with prices from Hobbyking/aliexpress (many people were very impressed with the kW/$), old versions of ODrive, and finally the last of the ODrive alpha stock for sale. I marked up the price from the nominal price of $120 because they were selling too fast, and I still sold out on Sunday morning ;D

Handcrusher5000 in action. You can see the ODrive to the right of the laptop dancing to the accelerations.

Handcrusher5000.

Brakeresistor heatsinking on extrusion. It was cool to feel the heat gradient along the extrusion ;D.

Alpha Shipping

The first batch of Alpha boards were shipped out on Tuesday. Here are some pictures.

Boards in boxes.

Accessory bags.

Some standoffs.

29/30 boxes ready to go. The last one I filled after I realised it was missing, after I took the picture.

30/30 boxes ready to go!

EU orders

The shipment of 21 ODrives going to Sweden to be resent from there, due to the exquisite dance of following VAT regulations, has been stuck in customs for a week. I supplied them with the additional information they needed on Friday (two days ago), so hopefully it will be released ASAP. I will keep you posted on any updates.

Kits

The order of 40 motors from Hobbyking is still on backorder, with no estimate when they will have additional stock. All they tell me is that "we usually get new stock every 30 days".

In any case, knowing that shipments from China likely has problems, I made a backup order of 40 similar motors from Aliexpress. They also took forever to get here, but they actually came in the end. Specifically, they are the EMP C4250 - 500kv. The motor has very similar dimensions, it is a slightly faster motor (slightly higher kv), and it seems to have a bit more cogging torque.

Finally, motors!

EMP C4250 - 500kv.

EMP C4250 - 500kv with the included accessories.

Discussions

GrayPillow wrote 05/29/2017 at 01:14 point

Awesome!! Amazing! Nice product  , is there a plan to lanch on kickstarter?

  Are you sure? yes | no

Oskar Weigl wrote 05/29/2017 at 01:19 point

The alpha stage has many purposes, the primary of which is to enable feedback to development, and to limit my support bandwidth to a small group of early adopters.

A secondary objective is to help people make some cool-ass projects, and hopefully some people will let me use footage of their project in the crowdfunding video.

So yes, as the Alpha stage matures, I plan to do a crowdfunding campaign.

  Are you sure? yes | no

GrayPillow wrote 05/29/2017 at 01:29 point

OK,I see. Nice! I want to join you but I have to throw myself into my own project. I will keep watching this project. Have a good luck!!!!

  Are you sure? yes | no