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Servo Setup

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Niko Vladimirov edited this page Jan 4, 2025 · 7 revisions

This page will guide you through the setup process of a simple Servo motor

Description of Settings

  • Servo Pin: the physical pin the servo motor is connected to
  • Min bone angle from 0: the lower bound of the bone rotation in degrees. If using Euler angles, Blender will overflow past -180 degrees back to 0, so typically the smallest value is -179 degrees
  • Max bone angle from 0: the upper bound of the bone rotation in degrees. If using Euler angles, Blender will overflow past 180 degrees back to 0, so typically the smallest value is 179 degrees
  • Min motor value from 0: the lower bound value to be sent to the microcontroller. Because we are sending an unsigned 16-bit integer, the lowest possible value is 0
  • Max motor value from 0: the upper bound value to be sent to the microcontroller. Because we are sending an unsigned 16-bit integer, the highest possible value is 65535

Typical Servo Setup

  1. Connect your servo to the microcontroller, making sure not to power it from the board (connect grounds, but connect the power of the servo to a battery or external power supply)
  2. Select the Servo pin inside MarIOnette
  3. Generate the code inside the Sync panel:
    • Name the Arduino file and selecting a location on your computer
    • Press "Sync"
    • Open the .ino file that was generated with Arduino IDE
    • Upload the code to your microcontroller
  4. Inside Blender, Enable Serial in the Serial panel
  5. Use the dropdown in the Serial panel to select your serial port
  6. Before pressing "Connect", ensure the servo will not move and cause damage!
  7. Once connected, adjust the values for the servo until the rotation of the bone matches the rotation of the servo in the real world

For a more thorough walkthrough, consider following this video tutorial

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