Hi,
Looking for a good servo for low noise stuff like animatronics? I've been looking around & cant find much on quiet stuff, i've seen them on stuff like stuffed toys, but cant find any.
I'm sure theres tons out there, i just dont know what to look for.
thnx
Standard RC servos are pretty quiet. At least as for as these 50+ year old ears are concerned. Any noise is likely coming from the mechanism the servo is attached to.
What problem are you trying to solve?
You can quite clearly hear the rc servos moving, i just need them to move silently, without the irritating buzzing noise every time they move.
I have never come across any totally silent servos, but in any large batch of micro servos that I have used there has been a high degree of variability of their noisiness. I used 26 identical Hi-Tec servos in a project once and some emitted the faintest buzz at all times, while others sounded like they had sand in their gearboxes. So if you have the luxury to test a large batch before buying, you may be able to find some quiet ones.
I've read there are different types of servos, ball bearing etc., anyone know of the different types of servos suitable for silent applications
Or what about servo motors, maybe theyre the culprit?
The D47 is the quietest servo I have come across: http://www.rc-dymond.com/index3.php?productID=176
its small and consumes little power but it does not have a lot of torque
"ball bearing" servos have a ball bearing between the case and the output shaft. Should make little/no difference in noise: its purpose is to reduce wear on the output hole and side-to-side slop of the shaft.
The big sources of noise are going to be the motor and the gear train. Plastic gears and a higher-quality motor (i.e., more expensive servos, instead of the ones built by Chinese political prisoner labor) are likely to reduce that. They make lubricants for the gear train that might help, too: try surfing some of the RC hobbyist sites for info about that.
I suspect that some of those animated stuffed toys are using actuators like solenoids, rather than servos, to save money on many functions. Those would generally be quieter. There was a site I stumbled upon years ago with a step-by-step dissection of a Furby (or is it "Furbie"??). You can get some ideas from sources like that.
And don't forget that, if you're putting it in a plush toy, the stuffing will significantly muffle the noise. Just cover all your robots in fake fur: not only will they be quieter, they'll be well-camouflaged when roaming in the wild ;D
Ran