Exercise/Characterize multiple servos connected via PCA9685 PWM controller

On this Page:

• Features
• Pictures of this project in use
• How to contribute

Additional pages:

• The rotary Encoder object - Reusable object for reading rotary encoder with push button
• The TIMI Interface object - Reusable object for driving all of the TIMI Displays
• The TIMI-130 Datasheet
• Testing Eyes - the 2nd device i exercized with this project

Most of us playing with servos in our projects have a single servo tester:

But when we are using a 16-channel PWM controller driving our servos we can either unplug each servo to test it or we can do something like this project!

I grabbed a TIMI-130 serial attached OLED display and a rotary encoder with pushbutton feature as be my interface and I used code I already had for the PCA9685 controller.

I then wrote a driver for the encoder which provided distance and velocity for the turning part a single, double-click for the push button part. See RotaryEncoder page

Then I created a single TIMI interface object by porting the python TIMI library. Now I can drive the display. See TIMI Displays page

In the end my cobbled together tester looks like this:

And this is the tester connected to the back of the 6-servo hardware I'm characterizing:

Lastly, this is the output from the tester:

To use this exercisor simply connect to the PCA9685 i2c bus and run the project.

• Steps through each of the servos from 0-15
• Cycles LO and HI for each servo
• Reminds which end of the range is currently being tested
• Emits (via debug_ the final LO, HI values for each servo tested.

Enjoy!

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