Hello,

I had some old Tower Hobbies STD TS-53 servos sitting around so I thought I'd try and use them. So far, I'm not having good luck. I tried the servosquirter code and ran into a problem. I have the servo hooked up to PB2 as instructed and when I apply power, I get a reading on the screen. As soon as I try to enter '[' or ']' for a new position it seems as if the whole thing resets.

Here is the result from my UART output:

ba2740
baba2790
bababa

After the first "ba" I hit '[' after the the "baba" I hit ']'.

The servo moves just a little bit and looks like it's twitching back and forth more than anything.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

My guess would be a power issue. What are you powering everything with? The 9V battery? I was running the NerdKit with LCD and also the LCD back-light along with a PS2 joystick and a servo the other night and the same thing was happening, and I'm powering the breadboard rails with a 5V 1A wall=wart. I determined everything was just drawing too much power after I disconnected the LCD back-light power and it worked fine.

Yup! Sounds like the servo has a little bit of an inrush issue. (pulls a little too much current to get going). Try adding a capacitor to the point where you tie in the power leads. I had to do the same with my little Futaba servos. I added a little 100uF 16V capacitor and it solved the problem here. The pic is a little over-exposed but you can see the cap right behind the servo plugs. This is the dual servo setup from another thread here in the forums.

Thanks, I was wondering if it would be something like this. Time to stock up on some other parts! :)

Sorry, I forgot to reply completely. I've got a wall wart hooked up that came with the LED Array kit.

mongo- Thanks for the capacitor idea! I actually just salvaged a few caps off a broken audio pre-amp board. I'm gonna make use of one!

...and thanks to you Phrank for figuring out the multi servo thing...