Bringup & dashboard

soarm_sdk ships a browser-based operator dashboard built on Viser, with live 3-D forward-kinematics visualization.

soarm-dashboard-setup --device /dev/ttyUSB0
# starts on http://localhost:8080 by default

soarm-dashboard-calibration launches the guided, four-step calibration workflow instead — see Calibration.

The 7 tabs

Tab	Description
Start Up	Connect/disconnect the polling thread; quick torque on/off; scan servos by ID range
Homing Wizard	Automatic motor-sweep ROM detection or manual hand-teach; writes offsets + angle limits to EEPROM; saves soarm100_rom.json
PID Tuning	Read/write P/D/I gains; step-response chart with a live 20 Hz position trace and automatic metrics
Command Panel	Per-joint position/speed/acceleration sliders; servo and wheel mode; sync-write to all joints
Recorder	Record joint trajectories from hardware to CSV; replay at configurable speed and loop count
Monitor	20 s rolling charts (position + speed); joint telemetry table; temp/current health; full register inspector
Reconfigure	Calibration: scan, assign IDs, angle limits, acc/speed/mode/torque/baud; export/import register snapshots as JSON

A shared sidebar (visible on every tab) holds serial device, baud rate, polling interval, and connection status. Every dashboard also gets a Home button (moves the arm to a known folded-flat pose via its own calibration) and a Shutdown button, by construction — no per-dashboard opt-in.

3-D FK visualization

When a URDF is available (default: SO-ARM100/Simulation/SO101/so101_new_calib.urdf), all link meshes load into the Viser scene and update at ~3 Hz from live encoder positions (yourdfpy + trimesh):

pip install yourdfpy trimesh

Homing Wizard

Automatic mode drives each joint in wheel mode, detects stall at both limits, records min/max ticks, restores servo mode, and moves to midpoint — a Dry-run checkbox simulates the sweep with FK animation without touching hardware. Manual mode disables torque so you can move joints by hand and record min/max via per-joint buttons. Both modes share the same Apply (write EEPROM) and Save JSON actions.

PID Tuning — step response

After writing new gains: set a step target, speed, acceleration, and duration; press Send Step; the chart shows reference vs. actual position at 20 Hz and computes steady-state error, overshoot, peak time, rise time, and settling time automatically.

Monitor

Two 20-second rolling charts (position, speed) update every 100 ms from a shared buffer. Temperature and current are sampled every 5th iteration to reduce bus load; the background daemon thread issues one GroupSyncRead per interval for all joints in a single bus transaction, falling back to per-servo reads on failure.

Command-line tools

Installing soarm_sdk puts these on $PATH: soarm-reconfigure (and --ui for a guided text UI), soarm-dashboard-setup, soarm-dashboard-calibration, soarm-calibrate-rom, soarm-widen-limit, soarm-monitor.