Hello. I have a project where I need to power a 12v Stepper motor and a 6v high torque servo. The servo draws to much current from the arduino so I wanted to have them both powered from the same external power supply. I used a 12v 2 amp DC power supply. The stepper works fine and I have a 5V voltage regulator to lower the voltage for the servo, which I figured would work fine off 5v. With power and ground in the servo does nothing. But once the input pin from the arduino gets connected it goes crazy and turns sporadically and makes noise. The sample sketch is simple.
I tried it with a smaller servo that works fine when powered from the arduino and also goes crazy when using the external 5v. I know I am doing something very simple wrong. All help is appreciated.
Question- how is a bypass capacitor different than a regular capacitor? Or is bypass capacitor just the term for when a capacitor is being used in that method.
Sounds like you don't have a common ground between the external servo power supply and the arduino. Below is a typical power setup. Bottom is how I get better servo performnce when using a 7805 reguator chip for power.
After not finding the right capacitor at radio shack I tried the common ground method and it worked great, thanks zoomkat! However, only for the small servo, not the bigger one. The larger one has no static though, it just does nothing. Which is still better than before.
Any reason why one servo would go and the other wouldnt?
here is the spec for the larger one...
4.8V 6V
Torque: 266.5 oz-inch 333 oz-inch
Speed: .20 sec @ 60° .16 sec @ 60°
Size- 2.6 x 1.18 x 2.25 in. (66x30x57mm)
Weight- 128g (4.52oz)