Hacking to make a continuous rotation servo

As part of the up-and-coming HackLlan show-and-tell session, and for the follow-up workshop, we're making robot kits in preparation for the Robot Week Wales.

As with most robotic projects, this begins with hacking some servos to make them rotate continuously. We could just buy factory-set rotational servos from our pals at Oomlout but as the workshop is to include "hardware hacking" we figured we'd have a got at modifying some micro servos.

We're after making some small, compact robots so these micro servos are the perfect size (plus of course, a ready-made continuous rotation servo is £11, a micro servo less than half this at £5 each). We already had a couple of these from an earlier project but if all goes well with this experiment, we'll be buying more!

At this stage, we're not sure if the modifications will work, but we've looked into how a servo works. It's basically a small motor with a control board. The output from the motor is geared right down, giving the servo plenty of torque (twisting power). The control board has a microcontroller and a rotary potentiometer, which is turned as the motor moves the servo "horn", which is connected to the shaft of the motor.

These easiest way to explain this is to have a look at what goes into a servo.

Whenever you take anything apart, the most important tool you can have is a digital camera - and a hammer. Hammers open anything ;-)

We put the hammer to one side and open up the servo with a tiny jeweller's screwdriver.

We actually found that the smallest flat-headed screwdriver worked better than even our smallest cross-headed 'driver (despite the servo having cross-headed screws holding it all together).

You can see that the motor shaft has plenty of cogs, gearing the output down many, many times. This is what gives the servo motor it's power.

Underneath the control board, you can just make out the rotary potentiometer. As the motor turns, the gears and cogs also turn, and the shaft on the second "pile" of cogs causes the wiper on the potentiometer to turn. This signal is fed back onto the control board, so that when the servo head has reached the required position, it knows to stop turning the motor.

We traced the wire from the pot to where it meets the control board. Taking photos (so it can be replaced later if necessary) we snipped the wire from the pot and taped it up. Now, when the motor turns, the control board won't know where the servo head is, and so will keep turning the motor.

The last thing to amend is the physical lock on the servo head.

A small "lug" on one of the cogs stops the head from turning too far during normal operation.

We snipped this lug off the cog and reassembled the servo, using the earlier photographs as reference. We then put the head back on the servo and turned it by hand, to check that it does, indeed, turn through 360 degrees. The last thing to do now is to check that the servo direction can be controlled by our microcontroller.....