Controlling a Servo Motor

suggest change

This example assumes you have a servo with the following characteristics, which happen to be typical:

You need to check if those values match your hardware, since forcing it to go outside its specified operating range can damage the servo. A damaged servo in turn has the potential to damage your Android Things device. The example ServoController class consists of two methods, setup() and setPosition():

public class ServoController {
    private double periodMs, maxTimeMs, minTimeMs;
    private Pwm pin;

    public void setup(String pinName) throws IOException {
        periodMs  = 20;
        maxTimeMs = 2.5;
        minTimeMs = 0.5;

        PeripheralManagerService service = new PeripheralManagerService();
        pin = service.openPwm(pinName);

        pin.setPwmFrequencyHz(1000.0d / periodMs);
        setPosition(90);
        pin.setEnabled(true);
    }

    public void setPosition(double degrees) {
        double pulseLengthMs = (degrees / 180.0 * (maxTimeMs - minTimeMs)) + minTimeMs;

        if (pulseLengthMs < minTimeMs) {
            pulseLengthMs = minTimeMs;
        } else if (pulseLengthMs > maxTimeMs) {
            pulseLengthMs = maxTimeMs;
        }

        double dutyCycle = pulseLengthMs / periodMs * 100.0;

        Log.i(TAG, "Duty cycle = " + dutyCycle + " pulse length = " + pulseLengthMs);

        try {
            pin.setPwmDutyCycle(dutyCycle);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

You can discover pin names that support PWM on your device as follows:

PeripheralManagerService service = new PeripheralManagerService();

for (String pinName : service.getPwmList() ) {
Log.i("ServoControlled","Pwm pin found: " + pinName);
}

In order to make your servo swinging forever between 80 degrees and 100 degrees, you can simply use the following code:

final ServoController servoController = new ServoController(pinName);

Thread th = new Thread(new Runnable() {
    @Override
    public void run() {
        while (true) {
            try {
                servoController.setPosition(80);
                Thread.sleep(500);
                servoController.setPosition(100);
                Thread.sleep(500);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }
});
th.start();

You can compile and deploy all of the above code without actually hooking any servo motors to the computing device. For the wiring, refer to your computing device pinout chart (e.g. a Raspberry Pi 3 pinout chart is available here).

Then you need to hook your servo to Vcc, Gnd, and signal.

Feedback about page:

Feedback:
Optional: your email if you want me to get back to you:


Android Things:
* Controlling a Servo Motor

Table Of Contents
2 Gradle
5 Intent
17 Service
19 WebView
31 SQLite
35 Glide
37 Dialog
38 ACRA
44 Handler
53 Toast
63 Menu
65 Picasso
70 Volley
71 Widgets
78 Realm
90 Spinner
95 OkHttp
108 TextView
109 ListView
111 Loader
118 Xposed
119 Security
121 ImageView
123 Doze Mode
130 Drawables
131 Colors
134 Fresco
139 AdMob
145 Keyboard
146 Button
150 EditText
155 Vk SDK
163 ExoPlayer
169 XMPP
175 OpenCV
177 Threads
184 ORMLite
186 TabLayout
190 LruCache
192 Zip files
194 Fastlane
199 FileIO
202 Moshi
209 Android Things
210 VideoView
216 Paint
218 ProGuard
226 CleverTap
228 ADB shell
229 Ping ICMP
230 AIDL
234 Context
240 JCodec
242 Okio
249 FuseView
254 Looper
261 Fastjson
263 Jackson
267 Smartcard