test your servos

so, thanks to alex posada (aka knal) i manage to troubleshoot a bit what was going wrong.. it comes down too basically a lack of power to feed the servos.. i was using a small servo and expected the arduino board to feed it, but when doing so the board was loosing the connection with the computer.. /dev was crashing and pd was frozen as a consecuence.

now things "work", though i have few questions:

  1. why is it that the 2 control pins from the servo have to be connected? if i unplug say servo #1 from pin2 then nothing works anymore

  2. servos seem to be always getting some unstable electricity flow, they are constantly doing a bit of noise like if they where moving in small tiny steps.

  3. the big servo manages to use the 180° but the little one moves only 45° using the same values

  4. the big servo moves fast in one direction, to return to its initial position it moves in a very slow way.

check this little 5megas video:

http://egsstreams.com/alejo/arduino_pd_servo.mov

I will continue to report here, so maybe it will help someone like me, non programmer, in the future.

tchuss!

/a