Servo Controller

Top of Revision 2.0 Board

Top of Revision 2.0 Board

I wanted to create a stand alone board that could drive servos and that could be controlled over USB. I used an ATMega328 and the

FT232RL. This final board as you can see is mostly all surface mount components. Below you can see my first prototype board, all through hole and could only control four servos, while this one can do eight.

This final board can be powered by either the USB or the barrel jack connector that powers the servos. I have noticed an issue that if the servos move to fast, it seems to be resetting the FT232RL, which is not such a big deal though since it is not plugged into the USB if it is being powered only by the barrel jack. The servo PWM is all done by my own interrupt driven code instead of using the hardware PWM for several reasons. The board runs at 16MHz and is capable of producing PWM signals from .5ms to 3ms (this is limited in software but can be changed to smaller or larger values). I used an ATMega328 for this, which is probably overkill for controlling servos (and man are they hard to find these days!), ATMega168 could e a drop in replacement, and many lesser micros could do the job as well.

This board also served as an experimental board to learn more about Atmel micros, since before I mostly used PIC (see senior project). Also, I wanted to practice more with surface mount components which is a bit intimidating, but turned out to be not such a big deal. I actually much prefer surface mount now. Again I used Eagle and sparkfun’s library. Also, I did all of the software development in in Linux which is sweet and the main reason I moved from PIC to atmel. You can install a GCC toolchain for the ATMega and us make and other build tools as you would normally. I even got a Makfile to have a “make install” rule to automatically program the chip with avrdude! Awesome!

The source code and Eagle project fies are available below. The code is not fully complete for the eight channel Rev. 2.0 board, only the first six servos work right now. I screwed up on the aove board and connected the last two servos to the wrong pins on the uController, this is fixed in the Eagle project. The menu and commend interface has not been fully updated to support all eight servos, but I will complete this soon and should not be too hard to figure out on your own.

Download Code + Eagle Files Here

Code: https://github.com/seiferteric/servo-controller

Eagle Project: https://github.com/seiferteric/servo-controller-eagle

Note:

If you want to compile this code, you will need a few things, if you are running Ubuntu/Debian install these packages:

  • gcc-avr
  • binutils-avr
  • avrdude
  • avr-libc
  • (build-essential … etc standard c dev stuff)
Schematic of Revision 2.0 Board

Schematic of Revision 2.0 Board

Top of Revision 1.0 Board

Top of Revision 1.0 Board