Servo Motor

The Need for a Servo Motor

You and your friend decide to meet and grab a quick bite at Subway near your home. You reach there before your friend and decide to wait for him outside. You see her when he reaches the place, but she doesn’t see you. So, you start giving her directions such as ‘I’m standing behind the lamp post in front of Subway’, ‘The lamp post next to the petrol station on the left side of the road’, and so on and so forth till the time she can finally locate you.

But, if your friend was a servo motor, you could just say something like ‘Look to your left, in the 45° direction.’ and be sure that she will locate you in one go.

This is what makes servo motors quite handy, and necessary; they do their job with unbeatable precision. Once you tell them to do something, they do it perfectly without needing your help. But what exactly is a servo motor?

What is the Servo Motor?

A servo motor, or simply, a servo, is a device that is used to rotate or push parts of a machine to which it is connected with precision. Unlike DC motors, they generally rotate to a particular angle and then stop.

If you pull apart a servo motor, you’ll find the following inside it:

1. A DC Motor
2. A Potentiometer
3. A gear train i.e. a series of gears that are connected such that their teeth are engaged/interconnected. (A gear can be visualized as a wheel with teeth, not the regular teeth though; sometimes more and sometimes less than 32!)
4. A control circuit: This circuit is the actual brain behind the precise working of the servo. It controls how much the servo should move or rotate depending on its input.