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basic servo question

kjhart0133

Hello,

 

I have a very basic question regarding servos.  An EMax ES-08A servo came with my Arduino starter kit and I threw together a short sketch to make its arm move from 0 to 180 degrees using a potentiometer.  The sketch worked very well, but one day while moving the arm to and fro, I left the program running with the arm set to some arbitrary position.  A few minutes later the servo started making noises and the 9V battery got very warm.  I disconnected it, but when I tried to run the program again, the servo arm would not move.  It made lots of noise like it was trying to move, but no motion occurred.  I reloaded the sketch several times, recompiled it just to be sure, but no luck.

 

My question is: if you leave the servo "running", i.e. with the pulses going to the control line, does that damage the servo?  Do you only send the pulses when you want it to move?  Then turn off the pulses.  Or, do I just have a bad servo?

 

Thanks for any help.

 

Kevin H.

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  • 0

    That sounds like a bad servo to me.  What code are you using?  Is it this

    #include <Servo.h>

     

    Servo myservo;  // create servo object to control a servo

     

    int potpin = 0;  // analog pin used to connect the potentiometer

    int val;    // variable to read the value from the analog pin

     

    void setup()

    {

       myservo.attach(9);  // attaches the servo on pin 9 to the servo object

    }

     

    void loop()

    {

       val = analogRead(potpin);            // reads the value of the potentiometer (value between 0 and 1023)

       val = map(val, 0, 1023, 0, 179);     // scale it to use it with the servo (value between 0 and 180)

       myservo.write(val);                  // sets the servo position according to the scaled value

       delay(15);                           // waits for the servo to get there

    }

  • 0 in reply to Nate1616

    Nate,

     

    That looks exactly like my code.  The servo was working perfectly with this code; I was just wondering if you leave the code running, constantly putting out the positioning pulses at one fixed position, is that bad for the servo?

     

    Kevin

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