Basic Servo Control for Beginners
Learn about servo control from our newest electronics information page!
From simply sweeping an object back and forth to adding steering to your robot or R/C car, hobby servos are a great way to add some motion to your next project. Servos allow you to easily control the speed, direction and position of the output shaft with just three wires!
Basic Servo Control for Beginners
February 25, 2020
An introductory tutorial demonstrating several ways to use and interact with servo motors!
Our new Basic Servo Control for Beginners Tutorial covers a few different ways to control servos, along with a project demonstrating how to control a servo from an external input. We cover some basics of controlling servos with one example that requires no programming at all. Then we will control the servos with code using the Arduino IDE and Python. Feel free to jump to the example you would like to work with depending on the parts and code environment you prefer!
Start learning all about servos!
A servo is any motor-driven system with a feedback element built in. Servos are found everywhere from heavy machinery, to power steering in vehicles, to robotics and a wide variety of electronics.Check out our Servos Explained page! Learn how servos work, how to control and power them, learn their different types, and more.
In general, the "Basic Servo Control for Beginners" looks pretty good (although since I'm recovering from cataract surgery [who spilled industrial quantities of laundry bluing on the world?] I wasn't up to reading it in great detail).
I did, however, spot one thing that would be confusing for a beginner (and goodness knows I've been a "beginner" in many aspects of computers over the more than 50 years I've been working with them, though I doubt that staring at keypunch machines contributed much to my cataracts!). In the section on Arduinos, there's a line
that I think could be very confusing. IM[NS]HO, it would be better to have something along the lines of
(and, of course, changing all instances of "servo" to "my_servo").
Thanks for the feedback, I'll be sure to pass this along to the author.