Sunday, November 15, 2015

Using Pololu Mini Maestro on Mac OSX 10.10

For my little hexapod project, I want to control 18 Tower Pro MG90S servos with an Arduino Nano.  To perform the motor control, I bought a Mini Maestro 18-Channel USB Servo Controller, made by Pololu.  However, I'm on a Mac and Pololu doesn't seem to offer support for Macs or be interested in doing so.  I want to manage the Mini Maestro via the Nano, but there seem to be settings that can only be adjusted via USB, e.g., the baud rate.  So, I spent some time trying to figure out how to do this and figured it might be useful to someone else.

The first thing I did was grab the Maestro Linux software. Then I used Homebrew to install Mono:
$ brew install mono
This gave me some obnoxious errors about missing libraries, which were sorted out by an additional installation:
$ brew cask install mono-mdk
After this, it became possible to fire up the Maestro Control Center GUI via:
$ env PATH=/Library/Frameworks/Mono.framework/Commands:$PATH mono MaestroControlCenter
However, it seems not to play nicely with the default installation of libusb.  So I uninstalled the default version and installed the cutting edge universal version that would hopefully play better with Mono:
$ brew uninstall libusb
$ brew install libusb --universal --HEAD
After this, I was able to open the GUI, although it was almost unusable due to visual artifacts.  However, it was enough to verify that I could move a servo on channel 0 and ensure that the controller settings had the right values.


1 comment:

  1. Excellent!
    brew install libusb --universal --HEAD
    solved my problem of MaestroControlCenter not finding libusb!
    MaestroControlCenter graphics seem OK.

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