CH24-E - Servo Random

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 Random program: https://makecode.microbit.org/_DakToe3Ep...

You should know by now we always like to give an example using random numbers!

We're generating a random number between 0 and 180 and then setting the servo to that angle.

A pause after each move of 50 milliseconds is just enough to get a "jittering" effect, but we could use a higher value if we wanted a bit more pause between moves.

For a bit more fun we could even use random values for our pause statement!

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.

The servo will just start to jitter and jump around!

This could be a useful effect for certain projects, and of course you can alter the variables and expand on this for even more jittery servo fun.

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