Servo Motor Buying Guide For Newbies For DIY Electronics

Reader Need Not to Know Anything! Be it Arduino or Raspberry or Whatever, Follow Servo Motor Buying Guide For Newbies For DIY Electronics. You have to read this huge guide but at the end – you will understand buying Servo Motor is not easy and get a model number for ordinary works.

Maxon manufactures great Servo Motors but we are talking about Servo Motors at few bucks for the newbies who use boards like Arduino. Arduino is not exactly “electronics”, neither Raspberry Pi. Actually these are not what we traditionally used for the word “electronics”. Electronics DIY is for the thought of production. Arduino coding also is not standard. Yes, there are long known “Open Source” electronics boards for DIY work which has good debugger. We are talking about the Servo Motors which just works with existing codes for Arduino like boards.

We promise that, we will not shower you hundreds of theories (as we normally do)! We will give you clear cut option to buy the Servo Motor which is cost effective and commonly used. As they are commonly used, you will get better chance to copy-paste the codes to test! When you will get used with Servo Motors, you possibly can write a Servo Motor Buying Guide For Electronics Projects yourself.

Servo Motor Buying Guide For Newbies For DIY Electronics : Our Mission!

Our mission is to find the model numbers from Adafruit like companies and copy-paste their codes for you. So that you can search with that model number and get the bargain stuff from Ebay, Amazon or whatever online store it is.

Victim Adafruit sells a Servo Motor “TowerPro SG-5010” :

Everything is great! But that $12 price tag is bad. Our “valued customers” can perform web search and buy the same model at as cheap cost as possible. Do not hurry. There may be innocent online shop owners who stocked the model for a hope to sell but Ebay, Amazon or Google never gave the result at top. Hence, they may sell at lesser cost. Shop owner may be a seller of puppets and not sure what to do with it. Invest a good time to find it. $6 (half of Adafruit for the same thing) is your target budget. Official website sells at $4.99 :

You can fly away after reading this line, but we would suggest to read a bit details about the common companies and more cheaper options (yeah, $1.5 is big money). Adafruit resells TowerPro, so, using that logic, this one :

is TowerPro (written on their Photograph’s sticker), that one is on official website :

$7 stuff. Obviously there is shipping charges (which is whooping $31.00 for shipping to India!), that is a work to find from Ebay, Amazon where we can get lesser cost. MG99R is worst possible servo motor for RC cars. We have not given verdict which one to buy. Arduino type “electronics” DIY websites commonly use them. Torque from Servo Motor is proportional to position error (oho, we forgot that we will not talk about the theories).

Servo Motor Buying Guide For Newbies For DIY Electronics : Companies!

Basically, there are few companies for Servo Motors at affordable range. One as you saw is TowerPro. Hitec, Futaba are the other companies. This TowerPro and Hitec possibly has connection. We saw TowerPro to curse cheap China products. God knows where it is made. Both of these companies use S type universal connector (simple jumper end, not important for most DIY work). Futaba uses J type connector (jumper end has a notch, not important for most DIY work). The output shaft of the servo is called spline. We will attach the servo horn or servo arm at spline. Splines have teeth, which varies in number. We say by adding T. These are some names with the numbers :

Ace/Thunder: 25T
Airtronics: 23T
Blue Bird: 25T
Cirrus: 25T
Duratrax: 25T
Futaba: 25T
Hitec: 24T
Hobbico: 25T (Some uses 24 splines)
HPI: 25T
Jr: 23T
KO: 23T
MRC: 23T
Multiplex: 23T
Power HD: 25T
Sanwa: 23T
Savox: 25T
Tamiya: 25T
Team Associated: 25T
Tower: 25T
Traxxas: 25T

Cheapest Servo Motor from them is TowerPro SG90 Servo. $1.5 or like that. Not bad at all for testing – but has obvious problems. TowerPro Micro Servo SG90 can drive an expert crazy – Arduino may reboot, sweep may not happen – hundreds of problems. TowerPro MG995 is a continuous rotation servo motor – continuous rotation usually means, feedback has been disabled. That may not be what you want.

Servo Motor Buying Guide : Extra Information

Instead of the plastic hardwares (plastic horns, SG90 also have them), may be buying metal hardware from TowerPro will be better. Hardware means those “attachments” which will help us to mount stuffs on the servo motor – like a proximity sensor. Proximity Sensor will spin left-right-left-right up to 180 degree continuously. Unless you want to hammer your husband or wife in that repeated way, need of more torque is less for basic DIY works.

We will conditionally control the rotation in whatever way with a Servo Motor. It is obvious that, a metal gear motor will NOT last longer. When there are jarred around, metal gears are best to choose. Due to wear, metal gears may eventually develop slight play and loss accuracy.

Generally speaking, black/brown is ground, red/orange is positive power, and white/yellow is control. Also the center wire is generally the positive power to prevent damage if the servo connector is reversed when plugged into servo pins.

Buying Servo Motor is not easy. That is why we started with TowerPro SG-5010. TowerPro SG-5010 may not be available in Ebay, Amazon in all countries. There are companies in India like robodo.electronics (we have nothing to do with them), search the model for your country and you may talk with such seller if you have question. You can point towards our this webpage or just tell that you want to use for general purpose works for Arduino. In robotics, we use Servo Motors from Maxon like companies. None will take money like Adafruit. Adafruit tested and they has codes, that model will work for ordinary works.

You got some information but ultimately got one option to start with. We can not say what is your need, if need matches Adafruit’s examples; that TowerPro SG-5010 is quite good.