Servos are great fun, and incredibly useful when you want to make something move.

They do have some issues at times, though. Sometimes you need to set them to a specific angle for assembly. Turning the output shaft manually can be problematic since they're not made for that and on cheaper servos you can strip gears or break teeth pretty easily. If the servo already has broken teeth or such, it's motion can be erratic and it's best to know that before you put things together. Finally servos can vary a bit in what their pulse width bounds are. If you need a full range of motion from them you need to figure out and account for those bounds (Adafruit servo libraries allow you to set them when you construct a servo object).

All in all, it would be nice to have a way to fiddle around with a servo before building it into a project.

This project does just that. Hook up a servo and test it's range of motion (0-180 degrees), test the smoothness of its motion by having it sweep back and forth between 0 and 180 at different speeds, and try different boundary pulse widths to find the servo's limits.

Angled shot of a Adafruit Feather M0 Express - ATSAMD21 Cortex M0.
At the Feather M0's heart is an ATSAMD21G18 ARM Cortex M0+ processor, clocked at 48 MHz and at 3.3V logic, the same one used in the new 
$19.95
In Stock
Angled shot of a Adafruit FeatherWing OLED - 128x32 OLED Add-on For Feather connected to a white breadboard and a lithium battery.
A Feather board without ambition is a Feather board without FeatherWings! This is the FeatherWing OLED: it adds a 128x32 monochrome OLED plus 3 user buttons to...
$14.95
In Stock
Triple prototyping feather wing PCB with socket headers installed
This is the FeatherWing Tripler - a prototyping add-on and more for all Feather boards. This is similar to our
$8.50
In Stock
Prototyping feather wing PCB with loose headers
A Feather board without ambition is a Feather board without FeatherWings!This is the FeatherWing Proto - a prototyping add-on for all Feather boards. Using our...
Out of Stock
Rotary Encoder with rubbery knob
This rotary encoder is the best of the best, it's a high-quality 24-pulse encoder, with detents and a nice feel. It is panel mountable for placement in a box, or you can plug it...
$4.50
In Stock
Angled shot of a 4-channel I2C-safe Bi-directional Logic Level Converter.
Because the Arduino (and Basic Stamp) are 5V devices, and most modern sensors, displays, flashcards, and modes are 3.3V-only, many makers find that they need to perform level...
$3.95
In Stock

Other Tools and Supplies

This guide was first published on Nov 16, 2018. It was last updated on Mar 18, 2024.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Mar 08, 2024.

Text editor powered by tinymce.