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Servo motors: overview

A project log for Supercon talk: a pragmatic guide to motor controls

Developing my first hardware con talk in the open

jonathan-beriJonathan Beri 11/11/2015 at 04:240 Comments

Servo motors are unique in that they can move to the angle your want and stay there - even when something pushes on it. On the inside there is a closed-loop control system but we can treat the thing as a black box (literally, though they sometimes come in blue.)

There's 2* very distinct flavors of Servo - one for the RC plane/animatronic market and one for high-end industrial automation. There are other nuances like plastic vs metal gearing or analog vs digital circuitry, but they are all controlled in generally the same way.

PROS

CONS

* there is a third flavor sometimes called "Smart" servos that have an on-board MCU but they're a different beast and out of scope for the talk.

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