RoboClaw 2x30A Motor Controller, 2 Channel, 30Amps Per Channel, 6-34VDC

The picture on this page is misleading, which is why I provide one of my own.I use it with an Arduino to drive the motors on a robot of mine. My build unfortunately puts a lot of strain on this controller, but it's shown it can handle the load time and time again. Even with my motors getting really hot, it has still run efficiently. The safety features may reduce the speed at points if it starts to get too, but that's only because my motors have high stall currents. Once my robot gets up to speed, the controller has very few, if any, problems. It can keep my robot going at a speed that I estimate to be around 15 mph. This controller can even lock my rear wheels like an e-brake, which makes for some very fun driving with my robot, but I try not to abuse this feature.Plus, if you ever need help troubleshooting your own build, there is a customer service number at the bottom of this page:http://www.ionmc.com/RoboClaw-2x30A-Motor-Controller_p_9.htmlThey've been very helpful in helping me work out the bugs that I had with this robot. This is a very robust controller that has frustrated me at times, but the customer service that helped me resolve these issues is the reason it has earned five stars from me. Additionally, that website also has a downloads section with a user manual for the controller and other resources for using it.If you've got a high demand project within this controller's capabilities, I would highly recommend getting controller. It's a bit of an investment, but for me it's been an investment well spent.

Just took the 2x30A out of the box. Isn't it supposed to come with a jumper? There isn't one with mine like it shows in the pictures?

UPDATE 2:I am very pleased to report that Basicmicro just released an update to Basicmicro Studio, as well as an update to the Roboclaw firmware (4.1.29). These updates appear to have eliminated 2.5 of my biggest gripes:- The Velocity PID autotune now produces useable, possibly even ideal results. I am currently using the stored auto generated values. I haven’t tried the position PID yet.- They added a serial input timeout feature to automatically E-stop the motors if serial comm is lost for x.x seconds. This is a must have safety feature for any “Smart” DIY project, which will surely have some power-on reset event or WDT at some point. Now it won’t crash into a wall when it happens.- The 0.5 part is that the serial uart also “seems” to be more stable. Admittedly, I am no longer reading the encoder speeds (or anything else) from the Roboclaw; just writing speed/position/accel, etc. I am now directly reading the encoder positions in parallel on the Teensy 3.2. Inefficient, yes, but the point is that the Roboclaw has not crashed, run off at full -speed, nor even needed to utilize the serial timeout feature since the update. The thing has been rock solid.I still have the MCP solution ready to go, but this update makes it an optional upgrade for my current application. Not to worry, I ha e bigger plans for the MCP anyway.Keep it up Basicmicro!UPDATE:I ended up upgrading to their MCP233 which adds multiple, configurable UART's and onboard scripting capability. My problem solved with a simple 4 line script that simply streams the encoder positions and speeds every 10ms on UART2. The motor commands, Acks and CRC can then work unfettered on UART0. The Roboclaw proved too sensitive to timing issues when trying to read/write ~10ms, and I believe collisions were the culprit. Much happier now.Original:Just another glorified home brew Arduino project turned product. Built and supported by amateurs who constantly cry in their own support forums that they are “too busy” to fix their MANY nagging bugs, or to better document the known limitations.The Ion Studio software crashes constantly, and the auto tune is an absolute joke. The results produced are so large, they make the motor vibrate violently. Divide the numbers by 100 or so, and the motor is silky smooth?The deal breaker for me was the poor reliability of the Serial UART, which makes anything this thing goes in a runaway disaster waiting to happen. Really, no failsafe timeout for a crappy 8N1 serial interface.The documentation is outdated, and the Arduino library/examples are poorly written. Beware that this is a library that has users constantly casting signed 32-bit integers into unsigned 32-bit integers for the library function calls, which is REALLY bad practice. Not all compilers will warn you about this, and it can cause lots of confusion when trying to read back values and compare to what you commanded.I wasted 4+ days troubleshooting with o-scope to get the most basic functionality to be semi-reliable; send 1 motor command, wait, read 1 motor speed, wait, etc... logging the fail/success rate. I could see the commands go out and the acks come back. I tried all available baud rates, various delays and time sequencing between write/read commands, pull-up resistors, limiting resistors, with limited success. At times, the error rate would get near zero, but under all conditions, eventually the timing error would get too great and a stop bit would be missed, and all reads would fail after that. I can code in things to check and to restart the port if it hangs, but I really shouldn’t have to for a stupid 38400 bps serial. Besides, I’m building a balance-not, so I cannot tolerate any delays or restarts.Not quite going in the trash, but IMO, this is only suitable for toy/hobby applications where high failure rates can be tolerated.

Super easy setup -- much nicer than the Kangaroo/Sabertooth combo. However,3 of them died in the project I was using, and I ultimately switched to a Maxon motor controller.