Mastering DC Servo Motors With ESP32 and Arduino

Using DC Servo Motors with ESP32 & Arduino—This guide covers everything you need to know to work with servo motors and includes the PCA9685 16-Channel PWM driver.

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We’re back with an in-depth look at DC Servo Motors. While we have worked with servo motors many times, there are still many aspects that we haven’t covered. Up until today, that is!

We’ll see how a servo motor works and understand the difference between analog and digital servo motors. We’ll see how to select a servo motor and interpret its spec sheets. And, of course, we’ll control some servo motors using an Arduino Uno and an ESP32 board.

Then, we will look at the PCA9685, a 12-bit PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) controller that can drive up to 16 servo motors from a single I2C interface. You can even cascade these boards for additional servos if 16 isn’t enough. This popular module is a great way to drive servo motors, but you need to understand a few of its idiosyncracies before you can use it correctly.

Finally, we will cover troubleshooting—what to do when your servo motor project doesn’t work. I’ll show you how to deal with several common servo motor problems.

Here is the Table of Contents for today’s video:

00:00 – Introduction
01:55 – Understanding Servo Motors
14:22 – Servo Motors & Accessories
20:15 – Servo Motors with Microcontrollers – Arduino
26:50 – Servo Motors with Microcontrollers – ESP32
31:41 – ESP32 Libraries
34:20 – PCA9685 16-Channel PWM Driver
49:56 – Servo Motor Troubleshooting
55:31 – Conclusion

Working with servo motors can be fun and rewarding. It’s great to bring to life something that moves. Use this video and the guide at https://dronebotworkshop.com/servoguide, and you’ll be a servo wizard in no time!

I’m currently building a dual robot arm using servo motors for a unique robot project. I’ll be showing it to you soon, so be sure to subscribe so you get notified when it’s ready.

Until then, have fun with servo motors!

Bill

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