2. Let Servo Rotate

In this chapter, we will show you how to make the servo work.

In a nutshell, to make the servo work you need to write 0.5ms to 2.5ms pulses to it every 20ms, for the principle see 1. Introduce Servo .

So we get the following code.

Code

import machine
import time
servo = machine.PWM(machine.Pin(18))
servo.freq(50)
def mapping(x, in_min, in_max, out_min, out_max):
    return (x - in_min) * (out_max - out_min) / (in_max - in_min) + out_min
def set_angle(pin,angle):
    pulse_width=mapping(angle, -90, 90, 2.5,0.5)
    duty=int(mapping(pulse_width, 0, 20, 0,65535))
    pin.duty_u16(duty)
for angle in range(-90,90,5):
    set_angle(servo,angle)
    time.sleep(0.1)

You can copy the above code into Thonny or open the sonar_2_servo_rotate.py under the path of pico_4wd_car-v2.0\examples\learn_modules. Then click the thonny_run button or press F5 to run it.

When you power up the Pico 4WD car, you will see the servo rotate from 0° to 180°.

How it works?

Let’s analyze this code.

  • The servo needs to accept the signal in a 20ms cycle, which means setting a PWM with a frequency of 50Hz(1/20ms).

    servo = machine.PWM(machine.Pin(18))
servo.freq(50)

  • Use the mapping() function to map the servo angle range (-90 ~ 90) to pulse width range (0.5 ~ 2.5ms).

    pulse_width=mapping(angle, -90, 90, 0.5,2.5)

  • Converts the pulse width from period to duty cycle. Since duty_u16() cannot be used with decimals (the value cannot be of floating point type), we use int() to force the duty to int type.

    duty=int(mapping(pulse_width, 0, 20, 0,65535))
pin.duty_u16(duty)