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20-channel Servo Shield

A project log for Servo Breakout for WeMos D1 Mini

Connect servos to your ESP8266 dev board.

dehipudeʃhipu 11/30/2016 at 13:051 Comment

Yes, I keep refining the design. No, I don't actually need all those servo shields. But it's a fun challenge. So I made another one, this time controlling up to 20 servos at once.

Note how all the servo sockets are on the edges. That means that if you use angled 3×10 male headers, you can actually stack those. And with the address selection on the analog pins, you can have up to 4 shields at once. That's 80 servos. Of course, if you just reprogram them to use a different address, you could have hundreds of them.

So where are the two extra servo channels coming from? Turns out that if your ATmega328p uses an internal oscilator and you don't have an external oscilator connected, you can use those pins as gpios.

I'm still conflicted about whether to actually order this board or not. One idea is to order it, rewrite the firmware in plain C, and submit this to the 1kB contest...

Discussions

deʃhipu wrote 11/30/2016 at 13:11 point

One possible optimization. If I made the board a bit wider (enough to fit an extra trace on the outside of the d1 mini headers), then it could be a single-sided board. The SMD components are on the bottom anyways, so there wouldn't even be any problem soldering the headers on the top side.

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