Servo Motor Demo

This project puts a servo motor through its paces, using a library unit I've written. The unit takes care of assigning the proper duty cycles and frequency to the associated degree positions of the shaft.

I'm using a Tower Pro SG-90 servo motor here. It's available for less than four bucks from Amazon, which is where I bought mine. There are only three connections: ground, +5V and a control line.

If you're not familiar with these devices, here's the dope. The microcontroller should spit out a pulse wave and vary the duty cycle. For this particular motor, the frequency of the signal is 50 Hz. By experimentation and observation, I noted that a pulse width of 825 microseconds brings the shaft to its 0-degree position, while a pulse width of 2550 microseconds spin it to the 180-degree position.

The library takes care of setting up the interrupts and timer to create the desired pulses. And it can accommodate a variety of motors through compilation constants. For details, read over the code which is richly commented throughout.

Click to get the source code.
Click to get the schematic PDF.

Next Project: Unipolar Stepper Motor #1