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Feature REquest OS3 gui: motors off button #30
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Thanks a lot for the suggestion! Automatically putting the motor drivers to sleep on the firmware backend side makes perfect sense, so we’ll add it to the roadmap.
In fact, this looks like an ideal "good first issue": add e.g.
_enable_driver()/_disable_driver()helpers in the MotorController, call_enable_driver()before movements, and_disable_driver()in the finally block afterwards so the drivers stay off by default.The motor drivers have a dedicated pin for that. Afaik, the shield has this pin pulled high per default and the pin is not connected to a free gpio. Check if the current hardware allows for software driver ENABLE/DISABLE functionality
Good point, it looks like the current Greenshield v1 doesn’t support disabling the motors. Still, I think it would be useful to add this capability to the firmware for hardware/shields that do support motor disable.
With #114 there is now a configurable idle timeout, which is used to turn off motors and ringlight on supported PCBs (Blackshield or custom boards). Thanks again to MicioMax for this!
As mentioned earlier, this will unfortunately not work on the current Greenshield because the motor enable pin is not switchable from the Raspberry Pi.
Since this is a hardware limitation of the current Greenshield revision and cannot be solved in OpenScan3 itself, I will close this issue for now. We can revisit this once there is a new hardware revision.
I think having a button to disable all motors would be beneficial when downloading large amounts of data that can take a long time, and the motor drivers and motors would not have to become too hot.
In my opinion a logic could also be introduced, namely to have to motors disabled by default, and only enabled when the motors are controlled, during scanning. At the end of the scan motors should also be disabled automatically.