Continuous Servo Mod: How To Turn Servos Into Drive Motors (Ant/Fairy Combat Robots)

Fairyweight and Antweight combat robots have long used cheap micro servos, a.k.a. 9-gram servos, for drive. It is possible to buy continuous rotation servos, but they are often over twice the price of a standard servo, and nearly all use crappy plastic gears. It’s very hard to find metal gear micro servos which are continuous rotation or ‘360 degree’ servos. These MG90S micro servos are under 13 grams each and have robust metal gears and tons of torque, all at just under $3 apiece. They are available from tons of sites like Amazon, eBay, Alibaba, Banggood, and more, and often in bulk sets of 4-10. This video will be a how-to in-depth tutorial for turning these readily available micro servos into awesome ESC/motor combos for small, lightweight robots! The end result will be around 100RPM at 5V but if you need more speed, running them at up to 2S lipo voltage (7-8 volts) should work.

I'm planning to use these for Drive motors in my new Antweight combat robot Mini Mulcher. More on that robot here: https://youtu.be/LyH_up5ZJxk

It’s worth noting that nearly all angular servos of all sizes work the same way, but the internals differ between them. The general goal of fooling the potentiometer to be centered is the same to modify any servo to 360, but some have potentiometers with mechanical endstops which complicates the mod, some have metal nubs instead of plastic ones requiring a Dremel to remove, etc. Some people have worked around this by supergluing the potentiometer shaft at the center and drilling out the plastic hub of the output gear, but this adds a lot of slop/play to the gears and isn’t ideal for combat. It does, however, allow you to avoid soldering on resistors. You could attempt this at your own risk.

Sorry about the audio issues in this video. My lav mic didn't want to play nice with my phone. On top of that, my phone apparently records variable refresh rate 4K by default. This caused a bunch of weird issues with editing, and my workaround made the audio slowly desynchronize from the video. I changed it to 60FPS 1080p for the future. I also have a misplaced effect at 14:58 that is supposed to be at 14:40. Whoops. Must have not shifted when I shortened a clip before it.

Better Potentiometer Explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6G1nHfvl4aI&feature=youtu.be&t=153

No Kid Hungry: https://www.nokidhungry.org/

Servos: https://bit.ly/MG90S_Servos Electronics Vice: https://bit.ly/MiniVice

Just 'Cuz Store: http://bit.ly/JustCuzStore

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Music provided by Argofox:

Dawne - Zero https://youtu.be/ZBNFR6DFvsw Viilo - Dreamwal ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HixZdhcLSdM