If you're not familiar with the project, I suggest heading over to the project description first.

Archive for March, 2008

Controlling a Parallax (Futaba) Continuous Rotation Servo with Arduino

Published
by
Allen
on 14. March, 2008
in Hardware and Production
. 15 Comments

Parallax (Futaba) Continuous Rotation ServoSo there's a presentation on controlling a basic servo at ITP on the very subject: class 3 (communication, servos, and pwm). As luck would have it, I have a continuous rotation servo, which functions a bit differently than the servo described in the presentation. In short, both types of servos use pulse width modulation (PWM) but the continuous rotation servo operates in terms of a "set point" and left and right rotation. You can also control speed.

UPDATE 2008-8-3: We ended up using "normal" (i.e. non-continuous) servos. So things work a bit differently now.

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Learning Arduino, AMD64 Ubuntu NBs

Published
by
Allen
on 3. March, 2008
in Hardware and Production
. 0 Comments

First hiccup I encountered was that the Arduino software doesn't run out of the box on an AMD64 platform (i.e. my desktop). Thankfully Tero Karvinen has a quick HOWTO on making the Arduino IDE run on an AMD64.

Got through the "Hello World" equivalent for Arduino, i.e. make an LED flash. Next on my list was getting the servomotor to move. As luck would have it there's a presentation from ITP on the very subject: class 3 (communication, servos, and pwm).