If you can't build it, simulate it

Despite the lack of news recently, it doesn't means things have gone quiet up here in Nerd Towers. In fact, it's the very opposite - beavering away making clever things means less time to write and tell you about them. But here's something that we're really quite proud of: a servo simulator.

In collaboration with botbuilder.co.uk we're making a USB/serial servo controller which uses EEPROM to store a sequence of commands to control the servo(s). The idea is that you can plug the robot into your USB port, download a "servo script" and sit back as your robot puppet performs it's sequence of tasks.

Using these excellent 360 degree servos the simulator allows you to set the min/max bands for each servo in a list, and to set the centre point. Servo movement over time is defined by plotting points on a graph. The editor also lets you play back (i.e. simulate) your servos movement so you can fine-tune your graph(s).

Here's an early version of the Flash-based online interface (in time it's hoped that users will be able to share servo scripts through the website, hence the online editor):



In this example, servos 1 and 3 have been hacked for continuous 360 degree rotation. Servo 2 is a "traditional" servo, moving through 0-180 degrees.