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2018 in Review and New EU Webshop Open

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 12/30/2018 at 06:113 Comments

Many of our European customers will be happy to know that the EU webshop is now officially open. Most of our products are now stocked and available from a warehouse in the UK. The shipping times to Europe should be drastically improved when ordering from there.


Now that we have reached the end of the year, I want to take the opportunity to summarise some of the highlights of the past year, and to thank each and everyone of you for the incredible support we've received.

In the beginning of 2018 we released ODrive v3.5, and with that we reached a stable hardware version. With that we were able to focus our efforts on improving the firmware, supporting software and the overall user experience.

We saw over 100 new features, improvements and fixes (full details in the Changelog). Just to lift out some highlights, we have implemented:

On top of this there are currently many excellent features waiting in Pull Requests which will be our priority to merge as soon as possible.

We love seeing so many fantastic projects come to life with the help of ODrive. Check out the Projects category on our forum to see all the ones people have chosen to share. I want to highlight two projects that I found to be particularly excellent.

The first one is a modular, heavy duty Swiss mill-turn machining center for cutting metal called SwissMak, which uses ODrive to precisely control the two spindles, and will also use ODrive for the movement axes in a future version. They successfully completed a kickstarter, and the first set of machines are being manufactured at this very moment.

front iso view 2 jan 17

The other project I want to feature is the Stanford Doggo, a quadruped robot made by a group of students at Stanford University. Check out more photos, and watch it walk, dance and jump extremely high in their excellent video presentation here.

Stanford Doggo

To all businesses and hobbyists alike that have chosen to use ODrive; a huge thanks to everyone that have helped to make this possible.

On top of that we want to specially thank all the direct contributors to the project. For your code contributions, test data, documentation improvements and for providing help to other users on our forum and Discord. Thank you so much, your contributions are invaluable.

In 2018 ODrive went from a promising project to a successful product and business. We hope to continue on this trend and make ODrive even better.

Discussions

David Risberg wrote 02/03/2019 at 13:16 point

Good to see the project moving forward. I hope it keeps growing into a stable business providing affordable servo controllers. Although I agree with Luis, as an EU customer I see the UK warehouse becoming a problem very soon...

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Luis wrote 01/24/2019 at 14:48 point

"Many of our European customers will be happy to know ... warehouse in the UK"

In the UK... with the brexit... Seems you like bets  (-.-')

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Joshua Elsdon wrote 12/31/2018 at 09:42 point

Good stuff! My Odrives have been chooching for a few months now. After about a week (where I was setting up control parameters and tweaking the mounting etc) I didn't need to touch them any more. All my development has been on the STM32 board I am using to drive them. Keep up the good work! 

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