Introduction: How to Control Servo Motors With an Arduino

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This miniature project will show you how to control a servo motor with an Arduino, but first you need to know what a servo motor actually is!

Servo motors are special types of motors that don't spin around in a circle, but move to a specific position and stay there until you tell them to move again. Servos usually only rotate 180 degrees.

There is a servo library, which is what allows us to control them with an Arduino.

Step 1: What You Will Need!

For today's project you will need:

1x Servo Motor

1x Arduino Board

1x Breadboard

1x Jumper Wires

1x Potentiometer

Step 2: Wiring the Potentiometer

The potentiometer has three pins:

- Wire the one on the left to GND (Ground)

- Wire the one on the right to 5V

- Wire the middle pin to Analog 0

Step 3: Wire Your Servo

The servo has three pins:

- the one on the left needs to be wired to GND

- the one in the middle needs to be wired to 5v

- the one on the right needs to be wired to digital pin 9

Step 4: Copy and Paste This Code Into Your Arduino IDE

#include
Servo myservo; // create servo object to control a servo
int potpin = 0; // analog pin used to connect the potentiometer
int val; // variable to read the value from the analog pin
void setup()
{
myservo.attach(9); // attaches the servo on pin 9 to the servo object
}
void loop()
{
val = analogRead(potpin); // reads the value of the
// potentiometer (value between
// 0 and 1023)
val = map(val, 0, 1023, 0, 179); // scale it to use it with
// the servo (value between 0 and
// 180)
myservo.write(val); // sets the servo position according
// to the scaled value
delay(15); // waits for the servo to get there
}