The Electro Viking - discontinued due to shitty servos

Work in progress - this project is not complete.

So I am building a sumo robot, and since it is my first robot I am going for the looks and bare functionality for start. So I bouth most of the parts from our local open source hardware provider Robofun.ro, wich I totally recommend to you if you are from Romania : 2 servos, 2 wheels, an Arduino Pro, one proximity sensor and 4 line following sensors. Since I don't really like a scruffy wired look on a robot, I thought the best armor could be provided by a helment and I hhave chosen a Viking plastic helm :P

So I will start testing and making parts individually first and after that put them togheter.

The Arduino Pro manufactured by Sparkfun needed some pins mounted, because in the prototyping stage I will plug in and out alot of components so this was the first step.

Then I pluged my FTDI cable and loaded the blinky led example schetch from Arduino IDE to test it out. It worked!

Empowered by this win I move to the next stages.

The servos are two S04NF STD made by DGServo. There is almost no data on the internet about them so I deducted from other related to it that they function with about 5V and they can rotate continuous.

I connected the Arduino output VCC that is 5V to the servos and the digital pins 1 and 2 to the signal cable of the servos. So the first code I tried was the sweep example from the Arduino IDE that I altered a little bit so it can move 2 servos instead of one. The servos happily swept back and forth. They were not in synch, but the victory was enough for me.

#include <Servo.h>
Servo leftservo;
Servo righttservo;
int pos = 0;
void setup()
{
 leftservo.attach(0);
 righttservo.attach(1);
}
void loop()
{
 for(pos = 0; pos < 180; pos += 1)
 {
  leftservo.write(pos);
  righttservo.write(pos);
  delay(15);
 }
 for(pos = 180; pos>=1; pos-=1)
 {
  leftservo.write(pos);
  righttservo.write(pos);
  delay(15);
 }
}


Next I tried another piece of code that controls the servos in a totally different way, using the Pulse-width modulation pins from the Arduino:

int servoPinl = 9;
int servoPinr = 10;
void setup()
{
 pinMode(servoPinl,OUTPUT);
 pinMode(servoPinr,OUTPUT);
}
void loop()
{
 int temp;
 for (temp = 0; temp <= 200; temp++)
 {
  digitalWrite(servoPinl,HIGH);
  digitalWrite(servoPinr,HIGH);
  delayMicroseconds(1500); // 1.5ms
  digitalWrite(servoPinl,LOW);
  digitalWrite(servoPinr,LOW);
  delay(20); // 20ms
 }
 for (temp = 0; temp <= 200; temp++)
 {
  digitalWrite(servoPinl,HIGH);
  digitalWrite(servoPinr,HIGH);
  delayMicroseconds(1800); // 1.8ms
  digitalWrite(servoPinl,LOW);
  digitalWrite(servoPinr,LOW);
  delay(20); // 20ms
 }  for (temp = 0; temp <= 200; temp++)
 {
  digitalWrite(servoPinl,HIGH);
  digitalWrite(servoPinr,HIGH);
  delayMicroseconds(1200); // 1.2ms
  digitalWrite(servoPinl,LOW);
  digitalWrite(servoPinr,LOW);
  delay(20); // 20ms
 }
}