By
@Kacenta
At its core it would be a servo tester + calibrator allowing you to prepare your servos for your projects without writing code every time.
@Kacenta
on
Servo Utility Platform
4h 6m 10s logged
Hello everyone,
Welcome to the first ever Devlog of the Servo Utility Platform (aka. S.U.P.)
This is the project I decided to make for Stardance, and the first ever solely non-AI-dependent one :D
So what even is S.U.P.?
[Demo can be found at the Bottom if you don’t like reading explanations :D]
The Servo Utility Platform is, I won’t lie, nothing super wow.
The idea is that instead of making a random test circuit every time I wanna test a new servo, I can use S.U.P. to quickly test it, calibrate it, and see if something is wrong with it.
At least that’s the plan cuz right now it’s still a bunch of wires on a breadboard :D
Currently, S.U.P. uses:
The first version was… really simple XD.
It was literally an ESP32 shooting electricity through a wire and nothing more.
[Check out the “Fancy This” picture at the bottom]
The goal wasn’t to make something impressive. It was just to make sure I can do the simplest thing imaginable:
“Can I make the servo move?”
The answer was yes (thankfully XD).
After that I added a Volume Knob (potentiometer).
[Check the Picture that features it (it’s really sad that I can’t put the pictures in-between text)]
This helped me control the servo angle, which made it more satisfying to play around with, but felt too weird.
It felt like giving a static position to the servo, not making it move.
The knob might work for a real 10$ servo tester but it’s just not my style.
So I replaced the potentiometer with his cooler Oklahoma bro: The Joystick.
[A video of me “casually” testing the hardware can be found down below]
And this is where it started feeling like the gadget of my dreams.
Instead of:
Pot position → Static Servo angle
I first changed it to:
Joystick Pot position → Static Servo angle
wow! amazing!
So I had to do a lil more work than changing one wire…
The redesigned system was way better:
Joystick x-axis position (still a pot just a fancy one) → offCenter from 0 (we actaully use the middle of the pot as 0 and the ends as -1 and 1) → Velocity → Servo Speed
Now moving the joystick slightly makes super small adjustments, while pushing it further makes the servo go wayy faster.
To make this feel better, I made my own acceleration function instead of just using a simple linear movement. The final result feels surprisingly nice.
Right now S.U.P. has:
Serial.println() gets old really quickly :I[Now look at the Super Cinematic picture of that MG90S Servo]
A few things I learned while making this:
The next steps are:
