RoboClaw 2x15A, 6-34VDC Regenerative Motor Controller

I switched from a Sabertooth because their support is bad. So glad I did. This board has way more for less money than Sabertooth. For example : USB connection, current monitoring and upper setpoints, input signal led, on board pid control, with a Sabertooth you would have to buy another board for this feature. So happy I switched to this board.

Works as expected. Connected first to a Windows PC with the USB interface and used the software from Waveshare to test. Worked directly. Thereafter connected to a raspberry Pi via the UART interface. Used the Waveshare libraries ( C code ) and works like a charm. Great controller!

The RoboClaw combines a motor driver, quadrature encoder decoder and motor controller into one product. This enables you to get your drive train set up and running in no-time. It can save you many hours of implementing all the motion control algorithms and tuning your motor's speed and position controller's PIDs! Simply wire it up according to the manual, configure the parameters as needed and auto-tune the position and velocity controller - no additional work is requred! In addition to that, there's also a 3rd party ROS driver available, which works pretty well, although it's not officially supported by the RoboClaw's manufacturer.

I bought this as a replacement for a Sabertooth motor controller that blew up and it has for the most part served me well with a couple minor complaints. As described in the product description the controller has a USB connector that can be talked to via the API the manufacturers provide. This is nice and is far more reliable than operation via a PWM input or using an Arduino as an intermediary. However as I mentioned I have the following complaints: 1. The ROS driver they list in on this page was not originally written by them, it was simply later picked up off of the original author. This would not matter were it not for the fact that last I checked the driver had several race conditions in the code that could lead to garbage being sent to the motor controller. 2. The Ion Studio app aside from not being cross OS compatible appears to potentially have issues with it's auto-tuning. When I attempted to use it with my setup, it led to some extremely weird behaviour and resulted in PID values that were useless, so I had to resort to manual tuning instead. 3. The motor controller freaks out if you disconnect an encoder when you are commanding the motor controller to reach a certain speed. This is actually more of a hardware issue, but given the controller only offers header pins, unless you intend to solder your encoder lines on this is something to be aware of. 4. Finally, I've encountered cases where despite cutting off all commands to the motor controller it continues with the last command. This means that if your motors are spinning like crazy, the only option at that stage is to find some way to cut power to the controller. Despite these complaints, the motor controller overall has been reliable and was a nice step up from my previous Sabertooth motor controller (Despite little difference in price, I might add).

Be VERY careful of the USB socket. it's surface mount soldered in place but the smallest force will dislodge the socket. I've managed to fix one by soldering a fly-lead on to the board - but the other one is toast. I'm going to cover the USB socket with a short USB lead plugged in with hot glue on the next one to try to make it a tiny bit more robust. The good bits: Very easy to set up with the IONStudio software. Great for potentiometer or quadrature closed loop setups. It has an auto-tune function but I never managed to make it work very well (easier to tune manually). If they put a decent through-hole USB socket on these, it would be the best controller in it's class.