Working servo board prototype

Here's a quick video and some photos showing the new 20-channel servo board in action! The actual board registers as a HID device. We're including sample code for Windows (but anyone wishing to port the code to Linux/MacOS should be able to do so using something like HIDApi).



The HID device communicates with the host via an 8-byte buffer.
To move the servos, simply set the 7th byte to value 201 (I don't know why we chose that value to represent the "move servo" command, but we did!) and the zero byte to the servo channel number (1-20) and the first byte to the movement value.
The range of valid movement values changes depending on the servo being used.
In theory, the values should be 100-200. This represents a signal range of 1ms to 2ms.



The mid-point should always be 150 (1.5ms) whatever the servo, but we've found that some of our cheap chinese HXT900 servos accept a much wider range (as low as 30, or 0.3ms and as high as 250 or 2.5ms before they start to "chatter" at the end of their range).


Snapshot of simple VB6 app sending data to a generic HID device through an eight-byte wide buffer