CH24-B - Servo Sweep Step

The 270 Degree Servo Motor has a 3-wire connector on the end that can plug directly into the pins on the back of the Bit Board.

Make sure the Orange Wire is closest to the number 13 for the Pin 13 column.

Then the Brown Wire should be closest to the micro:bit (in the - row) and the Red Wire will be in the middle (the +5v row).

If you've never used a micro:bit before you'll want to check out this guide: Bit Board V2 Setup and Use

We're going to load the following code for our Servo Sweep Step program: https://makecode.microbit.org/_1TmAxb5sr...

This code is a little more complex, but allows us to slow down the sweep of the servo.

We'll start at the 0 position, then do a repeat loop 180 times, changing the angle by 1 degree, with a pause after each move.

Once done there will be a 2 second pause, then we'll then do the same thing, but in reverse, starting at 180 and going down to 0.

Once the code is loaded it should start running immediately.

You can power the micro:bit via the USB cable you used to load the code, but now that we are using servos we recommend using a battery pack plugged into the Bit Board.

The Blue Pins on the Bit Board provide extra power (5 volts instead of 3 volts) by boosting the voltage coming from the battery pack. This helps improve servo performance, especially with multiple servos.

You can see the difference in power and speed by first running the code with just the USB cable powering the micro:bit and then plugging in the battery pack to the Bit Board.

Just like our last example the servo will "sweep" from one way to the other.

The difference this time is in how fast the servo moves...

Since we are moving the servo just one degree at a time, and pausing between each move, it's a much slower and smoother movement.

There may be times you want the servo to move more slowly or smoothly, and this is one method of achieving such movement.

Follow along with our recorded Live Stream!

You can watch the full video of us walking through this project, along with explaining and exploring the code: https://youtube.com/live/T8jrPuhOp_g