Using Servo Motors with Arduino

Learn to use Servo Motors with an Arduino. Directly, and with a PCA9685 I2C Servo Driver.

Today we’ll be making things move with Servo Motors!

Analog servo motors are inexpensive little powerhouses that can be perfect when you're designing something that needs to move. They pack a lot of torque for their size and their shaft position can be pretty accurately controlled.

We will start out by taking a look at how analog servo motors work and what kind of signal we’ll need to control them. We will also learn how to read the specs so that we can choose the best servo motor for our application.

There are two types of servo motors we will look at - conventional servos that rotate 180 or 270 degrees and continuous rotation servo motors.

Then it's time for the experiments. We will use a couple of the example sketches written for the Arduino Servo library to show just how easy it is to control a servo motor with an Arduino.

We will also examine a method of controlling LOTS of servo motors, the PCA9685 16-channel PWM controller board. As its name would imply this board lets you control 16 devices like servo motors and it interfaces to your Arduino or Raspberry Pi using the versatile I2C bus.

And if 16 servos still isn’t enough you can cascade up to 62 of these boards to drive an unimaginable 992 servo motors with just one Arduino!

I’ll settle for a more reasonable 4 servo motors, the 4 servo motors in the MeArm that I built in an earlier video. I’ll show you how to build a controller for the MeArm using an Arduino Uno and a PCA9685 board.

Here is the Table of Contents for this video:

00:00 - Introduction
02:14 - Servo Motor Basics
07:26 - Understanding Servo Specifications
09:25 - Servo Tester Demo
14:09 - Arduino Sweep Sketch
18:56 - Arduino Knob Sketch
25:12 - The PCA9685
30:05 - MeArm Controller

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[normanhall]

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[QuintBUILDs]

This was unlike anything I've seen on YouTube. Came for a refresher on arduino servo control and got SO much more! Content like this has the potential to replace the university system. Will be watching more of your videos and encouraging others to watch. Well done sir.

[schnasndasn]

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Happy new year! Keep up the excellent work! Greetings from Germany :)

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[Bemoldiyezoglu]

Forget any video you watch This is the best video ever made about servos. Thanks

[fxsrider]

I am 90% into a DIY Eggbot. The servo that lifts the pen is kicking my butt. The video is comprehensive and I have to say the graphics are very polished. Thank you for sharing your knowledge. Thank the people that help you produce this content as well.

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[parthasengupta]

I have not seen such a comprehensive, data rich, lucid and informative video tutorial before. I would like to thank you very much for your effort from the bottom of my heart. At the end of the tutorial you feel amazed at what you have learnt from scratch. I would like to know the details about constructing the robotic arm that you used to demonstrate the working of PCA9685. I am an Electrical Engineer and have interest in Arduino Projects, which i keep doing for my kids school projects. Thank you once again.

[larrybud]

Nice introduction. For others, in his initial code at 17:00, there's no need to "sweep" each degree. You could simply write 0 to the servo, wait a bit, then write 180, wait a bit, and loop back to 0. 3 or 4 lines of code.

[yarachenchad]

I started watching this video at two times speed but then I needed to slow it down. But after listening at two times speed I can now only tolerate watching this video at 1.5 speed. Great video very informative and through!

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At 40:58 you say "I hope you learned something about server motors". You gotta be kidding, I've learned A LOT, I mean, really, A LOT. I'm very thankful for your video. You are the best.

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Great video, very clear. Thank you very much for speaking slowly and clearly, it is really appreciated for not native English speakers.

[aminnima]

greetings from morocco not an engineering student and still can understund you well...thanks to your exeptional style of teaching