No, our servo controllers do not provide any feedback. If you want your program to know where the servo is supposed to be, you need to track the commands you send it. For example, if you know the speed, you can determine approximately what servo positions the controller is trying to set as a function of time.
I’m happy things are working well for you now. Your satisfaction means a lot to us.
To answer your questions, standard servos just don’t give you position information, which makes implementing (1) and (2) impossible. Unfortunately, you will not be able to get the servo position before making it move. If you have control over your shutdown sequence, you can make your servos go to some predefined home position before you turn them off. Alternatively, you might consider storing their positions in EEPROM before you turn them off so that you know what positions to expect the next time you turn them on. Of course this will only work if you can be sure someone hasn’t physically moved the servo while it was off.
We do plan on making servo controllers that can store sequences of moves.
Here is another quick question.
Can the usb 16 pololu controller move the servo in Group.
Meaning I want to control servo #0 and #1 to start and end at the same time.
No, our controller won’t let you move servos as a “group”; you’ll have to send position commands to each servo individually. If you set servo #0 and servo #1 speeds to be the same and send them the same position command one right after the other using a high baud rate, you should get something that’s reasonably close to group movement.
In general, if you use multiple serial ports, you will be able to send serial data in parallel and will hence be able to transmit information faster. The down side, of course, is that your application will use multiple ports.
Servo control signals consist of short pulses that occur every 20ms (the width of these pulses determines the servo’s position). As such, the servo will never update its position faster than once every 20ms. I figure that if you are running at 38.4k baud, it should take approximately 25ms to update all 16 servos using Pololu mode, which is only slightly longer than your minimum update resolution.
We do plan on making servo controllers that can control more than 16 servos.
Unfortunately we don’t have any details at the moment, so I can’t give you much in the way of answers. How many servos would you like it to be able to control? Would 32 be much more useful than 24? It would probably come out late this year at the earliest.
32 would be the best.
I find that 24 is not enough for robot.
If you want to add the hands to the robot, I find it is best
with 32.
I think it will sell better with 32, and beside it doesn:t hurt to have more.
I don:t mind paying more with 32 servo.
Right now I am using 30 servo.
I have one 16 pololu and I will buy another 16 pololu.
It takes up space with two servo controller.
It would be better If I have 1 servo controller that do 32.