[Dan Kitchen] has a great solution for making servos easy to hack.
Every hacker has a drawer full of servo’s somewhere. Just about every project that uses them starts off by measuring the spacing and designing some obscure bracket to meet that unique motor’s size. However, what if you could use common wood screws and hand tools to use them right away?
[Dan]’s solution is to make a case from recycled HDPE lumber, the same sort of material you might buy for a deck. This material is sandable, carvable, and can be drilled into. The case encapsulates the servo motor completely. One side has a freewheeling wooden disk and the other side’s disk is attached to the motor. Now when you need motion you can work with the servo as if it were just a block of wood. Very cool.
[Dan] appears to be moving to make this a commercial product and we can see why. Though we see no reason why an enterprising hacker or hackerspace couldn’t come up with their own variations on this great idea.
Thanks for the great article Gerrit! The idea for Servo Socks came from the exact frustration you described in making obscure little brackets ;-)
and in 10 minutes all his designs will be copied and uploaded to thingiverse…..
pfffff!!!!
Also, I did a bracket for the SG90 servo some time ago using a cylinder instead of a cube :)
Go and put a thank you on his Indiegogo https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/servo-socks-make-stuff-move#/
I don’t get it. A video would be very helpful. If you can stick the servo to the hunk of fake wood, can’t you just stick it where you want it without the fake wood? And I don’t get how the wooden wheel is better than the splines that fit different horns, and the freewheeling wheel. This may be a genius idea, but I am just not seeing it. As I said a video would clarify things a lot.
https://hackaday.io/project/165371/gallery#9c791d5df87a5218c8ab72588d06c487
This picture in the main article would have helped quite a lot.
It is indeed quite a good idea.
Add some seals and you might even water proof (resist) them.
And yet I agree with you, you could just as easily stick the servo without the fake wood and figure out some other protection.
Espeically if you dont have the ability to 3D print or carve up HDPE.
BUt if this is part of your go to building blocks kit of parts….
I saw the project and the pictures, and they left me even more confused as to what you were gaining with the servo socks. I may spend way too much time on you tube but it seems to normal way to mount a servo is with hot melt glue.
Hey Reg, I was using the hot glue, custom bits of wood, plastic metal etc to mount servos and found that it was frustrating or would ruin the servo or took longer than I cared to spend.
So I figured this case that snaps over the servo accomplished a few things:
1. I can mount the servo with regular #6 or number # screws instead of some sort of super tiny weak screws or glue. I tried these things any with how strong servos can be, these mounting options would fail.
2. They become part of the structure of what you are building.
3. The servo horn is somewhat strong but when you try to mount anything significant to it the connection was weak and again tiny screws.. so with the disc in the channels in the case, it takes the load off of the servo motor.
4. Not everyone has access to the tools that some people have. For example sure someone can simply reverse engineer them and 3D print but not everyone has a 3D printer and 3D prints don’t take screws as well.
5. They do provide protection but I will admit that wan’t the intention, it’s more about mounting with regular hardware
If you are interested in some videos showing a bit more of the intent you could check out our youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3QPj9vHLuaJhO5ROM6hKow
We are mainly working with educators where we have heard many times that when students try to mount servo motors in projects they are often left feeling discouraged, Servo Socks solve this frustration.
Thanks for your feedback! I always like to hear how they work (or don’t work) for people
cheers
-Dan
I believe a great deal could be learned nowadays through R/C magazines from the 1980’s regarding servo “tips and tricks”…