Rotation is part of our daily lives, whether we notice it or not, without it the world as it is today would simply not function. Forget zombies, the eradication of the wheel would send the world into mass panic. Nowadays however there are many objects that can rotate, ever since Faraday coined his law of electromagnetic induction which lead to the electric motor, electronics enthusiasts have been spinning stuff like crazy. There are plenty of devices that spin in electronics, as well as doing a whole lot more. One such device is the Servo!
Without the Servo my robot arm would not be possible; in fact anything that requires accurate amounts of rotation is made so much easier by the servo! But what is the Servo and why are they so great? Well today we find out! Much like a biologist dissects a frog as part of their A Level, I am going to dissect a Servo to see what makes it tick! What we are going to see is just a classic Servo, it has a range of 180 degrees with an accuracy of down to a degree or more depending on how high quality your hardware is. The other type of Servo you may commonly encounter is the continuous rotation servo, which essentially acts like your average electric motor, except it rotates a lot slower.
Before I get the Servo to a place where I haven't a hope of putting it back together (it's bust anyway!) lets take a look at it:
Now to the main question, what makes the servo such a fantastic piece of equipment. Well this is all to do with feedback. Servo's can feedback their current position. This allows the servo to be rotated to very exact positions. Exact amounts of rotation are extremely useful and where a lot harder to achieve before the servo. To give one example, a lot of Industrial CNC machinery use Servo's as their drive motors. Because of their accuracy parts can be made to much lower tolerances, allowing for smaller and more sophisticated products! Like the circuit board in your phone!
I hope you enjoyed this detour into the Servo! Updates on my current ongoing projects will be coming soon, as well as the second part on Raspberry Pi Remote access!
Sam