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12/2 - 12/8

A project log for Bot-thoven: A Robot Musician

Designing a Servo Motor Based Mallet System to Generate Musical Expression in Instrument Playing Robots

jason-pJason P. 12/12/2019 at 14:200 Comments

Plan

This week, I will construct more servo-mallet systems to use for testing the control of multiple servo movements with my PCA9685 PWM/Servo Driver from Adafruit.

Procedures

I took the stands which finished 3D printing from last week and attached the servo and mallet onto it to build three additional complete servo-mallet systems. I also had to solder all the pins onto the Servo Driver which arrived from Adafruit. 

Progress

Above is an image of the Servo Driver from Adafruit which arrived this week. The image shows the driver after I completed soldering on all of the pins. 

After completing putting together my new additional servo-mallet systems (shown above), I attached the servos to my Servo Driver shield. I spent Thursday taking the time to understand the PCA9685 library and running the example “Servo” code onto my board. Running the example code allowed me to verify that the Servo Driver works as intended in controlling multiple servo movements at the same time through just two analog pins. 

Problems

I will need to take what I have learned from familiarizing myself with the PCA9685 library and update the example code to have the servos move along my desired goal of appropriately striking a xylophone key. 

Discussions