Author: Dean Edis

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Useless Box – The Servos

Servos

Getting a servo to move is a bit more complicated that getting an electric motor to spin, but not much so.

Servos are typically limited to being able to rotate 180 degrees, which means it’s not just a simple case of applying a voltage to make it ‘spin’.
Instead the Arduino can send a ‘pulsed’ signal to the servo which governs the position.  There are many articles out there describing how to do this, but the Arduino servo library has excellent documentation and clear steps on the basics.

Thankfully the basics is all I need.

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Useless Box – The Beginning

The Beginning

So this is it – My first Arduino project!  After months of see YouTube videos and Twitter updates from people working on their own Arduino projects, I finally bit the bullet and bought my own ‘starter kit’ from Amazon.

I didn’t just want to make an LED flash on and off (One of the usual Arduino beginner projects) – I wanted to Make Stuff Move.  Curtesy of a dad with a few spare radio control servos, and a bit of Googling, I felt ready to start making my Useless Box.

Coding is no problem – That’s what I do professionally – And as a child of the 80’s I’ve still got a LOT of Lego kicking about, there’s not much holding me back.

If you haven’t seen a ‘Useless Box’ before, go and check them out on YouTube.  Simply put, you have a hinged box with a switch on it.  You flick the switch, the box opens, and a ‘finger’ turns it off again.

That’s it.

Believe me – It’s more fun than it sounds.