
giga
USA
Asked
— Edited
For the to to I'm about to build I need 18 servos 2 dc motors and a couple ultrasonics but as far as I know the ez board only has 20 digital I/O's and it looks like the motor controller takes 5!? How and can you add more servos controls? And can the program control more then 1 board?
Yes, 2 boards work seamlessly in the software. A few people use multiple boards without any problems.
However, I would try to balance the load over the two boards as much as possible.
Why is that?
Well you don't have to but it makes sense not to put too many heavy loads on one board, try and pull too much current through one board and it'll brown out, spread the load and you reduce that risk. If you have 2 board you might as well.
Well ill be using some heavy dusty servos so they will have external power- also how do you hook up external power for heavy duty servos?
I'm running 3 boards in my full size Lost in Space B9 robot and it works amazingly well. Seamless. ARC does all the dancing for you. just connect each board to your computer and ARC through the Bluetooth and set the controls or scripts as needed. Very EZ.
I also am running external power to one heavy duty servo and will be adding two more later. You run you're external power supply direct to the servos. You can even install a 5vdc relay inline and have EZB control it with a script. That way you can turn on and off the power to the servo only when you need it.
Have fun,
Dave Schulpius
Lol so funny you post I saw your b9 on YouTube and its what inspired me for my robot. I'm gonna build the lost in space robot from the movie. So are you saying the servo only the signal is connect to the ez board and the power is direct to a battery?
Awesome giga! That's over the top! The movie B9 was wicked and I've never heard of anyone redoing him. EZ-B should really bring him to life. What are you going to do about the voice? The same voice actor (Dick Tufeld) did the voice in both the B9 from the original series and Rambler-Crane series Robot from the movie. I'll have over 400 voice clips that will be played by a MP3 Trigger and controlled through the Speech Recognition feature of EZ-B.
As far as the servo, I only have one being used so far. The remaining motors I'm using are all DC motors controlled by EZ-B through H-bridges. That servo is a monster top end servo and I'm using it for my bubble lifter. It's a Seiko UAV servo PS-050 bought from: troybuiltmodels.com
It has 5 wires; Two are for Pos & Neg power wires and three are for RC or Microprocessor control. In the case of EZ-B the last three would go to the digital port (Ground, 5vdc, Signal).
On a regular servo with only three wires you need to attach: The Data wire from the servo to a Digital Port Signal pin on EZ-B The Power wire from the servo the Power Supply's Positave The Ground wire from the servo to both the power supplys Neg and EZ-B's Digital port ground pin
Something like this:
Hope this helps, Dave
Decent answer Dave....well. said