First spin#

This is the motor-on-the-bench walkthrough: from bare wires to a spinning wheel and back to a controlled stop, with what you should see at each step and what to do when you don’t. It assumes you’ve built the CLI (Getting started).

A direct-drive hub motor has real torque (2 N·m stall) and no gearbox to slow it down. Before anything spins: get the wheel off the ground or clear of fingers, cables, and the edge of the bench. Ctrl-C brakes, but only while the process is alive to do it. → Safety

1. Wire it and power it#

Signal cable to the adapter (white → A, orange → B, brown → ground), power cable to 18 V. If you’ve done this before and it didn’t work, swap orange and white — the M0601’s A/B labels are backwards relative to many adapters.

2. Find the motor#

m0601 scan

A fresh motor ships at ID 0x01, so you should see something like:

Found 1 motor(s):
  - ID 0x01 (decimal 1)
Use:  --id 0x01

That Use: line is a copy-paste convenience for later commands. If instead you get No motors found, the checklist it prints is the right order to work through: 18 V power on, brown wire grounded, and — most likely — A/B swapped. A silent bus is almost always wiring, not software.

3. Read its state without moving it#

m0601 info

info sends a single query and prints a configuration block plus one live readout — mode, speed, current, position, winding temperature, and any fault bits. Nothing moves. A healthy idle motor reads +0 RPM, a small current offset, and Error: 0x00 OK. If you see Live readout: no valid response, the bus found the motor during scan but isn’t getting a clean reply now — recheck the connection.

4. Spin it, briefly and on a timer#

Now the wheel moves. drive holds one setpoint and resends it at 50 Hz until a timer runs out or you interrupt, then it brakes. Start with a bounded run so it stops itself:

m0601 drive velocity --rpm 100 --secs 3

The wheel ramps to 100 RPM, holds for three seconds, and brakes. You’ll see a live one-line readout while it runs and Stopped and braked after 3.0 s. at the end. Because every exit path brakes — timer, Ctrl-C, even a panic — there’s no way to leave this command with the wheel coasting unless the whole process is killed.

Try reverse and a gentler ramp:

m0601 drive velocity --rpm -80 --secs 3         # the other way
m0601 drive velocity --rpm 200 --accel 5         # softer acceleration

That --accel 5 matters more than it looks: acceleration 1 (the default) is the motor’s fastest ramp, and a big step there on a loaded wheel can spike current hard enough to trip the 3 A protection. Larger numbers ramp gentler.

Keep the number small, though. The ramp slows quickly — measured, a step to 120 RPM takes ~0.45 s at 1, ~2 s at 5, and had not arrived after 3 s at 20. So 3–5 softens a launch, while 40 is close to a standstill and will look like a broken motor. And note --accel 0 is not a safe middle: it selects the motor’s default, which is the same ramp as 1 (why).

5. Take the wheel#

m0601 control --rpm 100

This opens a full-screen dashboard and drives from the keyboard. F and B go forward and back at your preset; 1–5 jump to 50–250 RPM; the arrow keys nudge ±10; S stops; K is the electric brake. Q (or Esc, or Ctrl-C) quits — and quitting forces velocity mode, zeroes, and brakes, so the wheel is always stopped when you land back at the shell.

Watch the mode line. The dashboard shows the mode the motor reports, not just what you asked for, and it turns red if the two disagree. That’s deliberate: it’s exactly how a “brake” keypress could otherwise freewheel a wheel while the screen cheerfully says BRAKING.

Where to go next#

  • The CLI guide documents every command in depth.
  • If you’re wiring this into your own robot code, switch to the library guide.
  • To understand why any of the above works the way it does — the 50 Hz floor, the braking dance, the mode display — read Concepts.
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