Servo Kit for Raspberry Pi

DESCRIPTION

Help yourself by making your life easier with the Servo Six board kit, designed to simplify the process of connecting up to six servo motors to your favourite Raspberry Pi or Arduino.

FEATURES

• 1x Servo Six interface board
• 2x 9g servomotors
• 1x Set of jumper wires (female to female)
• 1x Raspberry Leaf pin identification template
• 1x 4AA battery box

RESOURCES

servosix Python library on GitHub

Getting Started

Although you can use other libraries to control the servo motors, the easiest way to control them in Python is to download the servosix Python library on GitHub where you will also find the commands to install the library.

This library based on Richard Hurst’s ServoBlaster code. This allows accurate servo positioning with a nice easy to use Python interface.

2) Place the Raspberry Leaf GPIO template over the GPIO pins as shown below.

3) Connect a Servomotor to the ServoSix board as shown below. It needs to be the right way around, so make sure that the orange control lead is to the left as shown below.

4) Connect the ServoSix to your Raspberry Pi as follows:

• One lead from GND on the GPIO connector to GND on the ServoSix
• One lead from GPIO17 on the GPIO connector to the pin marked ‘1’ on the ServoSix.

5) Connect the battery holder to the screw terminals making sure that the red lead goes to +V and the black to GND on the Servo Six. Fit batteries and the LED on the ServoSix will light to show that it’s powered up and ready to go.

6. Now run the test program in the examples folder as shown below. You will be prompted to enter the servo to move (1) and then the angle to set it to (90).

This should set the servo’s arm to its middle position. Try entering different angles to see the servo arm move.

Reference

You will find full documentation for the library in the Github repository.

You can use up to 6 servos with the ServoSix. To connect a ServoSix board to a Raspberry Pi use one a female to female jumper wire to connect ground (GND) on the Raspberry Pi to GND on the ServoSix board. Then, for each servo (up to six) that you want to control, you also need a female to female jumper wire connecting the control pin for that servo on the ServoSix board to one of the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi.

As a hint, the ServoSix board has the GPIO pin to be used with a particular control pin written next to it.