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Montana Kid's Robotics Club Continuous 2 servo locomotion Is there a way to command the servo to completely stop?

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We are building an IR Arduino uno controlled (from NEC remote)  mobile robot with two servos.  Now we used the usual servo library and it worked well until we tried to stop the servo. The servo will drift ever so slightly, because the servo is updated about every 20 milliseconds, therefore it drifts and the robot at stop continues to move.  Is there a way to command the servo to completely stop?  I thought of a cutoff power rellay but maybe there's a better way

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  • Both ways are good. If you kill the PWM signal (e.g. reconfigure the pin to be an input or set the PWM to an invalid value) then a decent (or semi-decent, or even some very low-end! but not always) hobby servo will automatically stop movement as Doug says. It's a common situation, e.g. see here: https://forum.arduino.cc/t/turning-off-pwm-signal-to-servos/659723

    The other way, cutting off power, is also useful sometimes, simply because your power consumption goes to zero. For a robot running on batteries, that's very convenient if the robot will be at a standstill for long periods. If it were me, I'd be adding a MOSFET to control the power, and then that way I have two choices in the code. It consumes a GPIO signal to control the power, but that's usually of little consequence unless you're really cost-cutting and are using a small microcontroller or are unwilling to use an I/O expander for instance.

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  • Both ways are good. If you kill the PWM signal (e.g. reconfigure the pin to be an input or set the PWM to an invalid value) then a decent (or semi-decent, or even some very low-end! but not always) hobby servo will automatically stop movement as Doug says. It's a common situation, e.g. see here: https://forum.arduino.cc/t/turning-off-pwm-signal-to-servos/659723

    The other way, cutting off power, is also useful sometimes, simply because your power consumption goes to zero. For a robot running on batteries, that's very convenient if the robot will be at a standstill for long periods. If it were me, I'd be adding a MOSFET to control the power, and then that way I have two choices in the code. It consumes a GPIO signal to control the power, but that's usually of little consequence unless you're really cost-cutting and are using a small microcontroller or are unwilling to use an I/O expander for instance.

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