Possible to connect 12 micro servos to Arduino Uno board and control each one separately?

I am as much of a novice to Firefly and Arduino as one can get. I have 12 servos and an Arduino Uno board... is it possible to connect them all to a single board and control their rotation values in Firefly...? I'm investigating myself as of writing this post, but need to learn quickly within the next week. Thank you for any guidance.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Artyom Maxim on April 23, 2013 at 9:31am

Have you tried looking into Shift Registers? http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/ShiftOut - they describe how to use them to switch leds, but you can also do the same thing with servos i think.

Permalink Reply by Adam Roark on April 23, 2013 at 10:35am

thank you for the responses guys; i'm looking into this :)

Permalink Reply by Andy Payne on April 23, 2013 at 12:21pm

Hi Adam,

As Shahriar mentioned... you can definitely control many servos using Firefly. Technically with Firefly's current configuration with the Uno, you can only control up to 9 servos with the Uno (because 3 pins have been dedicated to inputs). So, if you want to control more than this, then you might need to bump up to the Mega. The important thing about controlling lots of servos is your power consumption. You need to provide enough power to support all of your servos. You need to find out how much current each of your servos draw and then multiply that by the number of servos you're going to use. Then you need a power supply that can handle that (typically 5V and however much current you calculated). The other thing to remember is to make sure you connect the ground of your external power supply to the ground on your arduino (all of your grounds need to be connected together). Other than that, it should be pretty straightforward.

Cheers,

Andy

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