We see a lot of motor boards for the Raspberry Pi here at The MagPi, but very few servo controllers. On some level, they’re very similar: they drive an electronic motor that can be programmed by the Pi. The major difference is the power and accuracy of the components; motors tend to just spin, while you can tell a servo to turn a certain amount. The limitations of both types can be worked around with a good bit of code and know-how, but it’s best to use a dedicated driver for each.

The Servo Kit we’re looking at here from Monk Makes comprises several parts, chief among them being the Servo Six board, a dedicated servo controller. The rest of the kit is a couple of simple servo motors, some jumper wires, and a battery case. It’s enough to get you playing around with servos, with room for improvement as you learn.

It connects to the Raspberry Pi via seven pins (six GPIO and one GND). As it has so few connections, it doesn’t function as a HAT; instead, you’ll be connecting it via the jumper cables. This is better for a lot of projects, as it means the rest of the GPIO pins are available for other bits. You’ll need to figure out a workaround if you do have a HAT as part of your project, though.

Construction is simple: there’s no soldering involved, and there’s plenty of info on the Servo Six page and GitHub repo for putting together a simple little circuit and programming it. The code uses Python, as usual, and instead of the simple forward, left, right, and stop commands from other Monk Makes motor boards, this one works in angles. Setting angles will cause the servo to spin to what it defines as that angle, but it will require calibrating for your project, or at the very least some trial and error. You’ll have to make sure you understand which angle spins where, as well, when you want to move it ‘back’, and there are some little tricks you’ll need to make use of to spin it in the correct direction sometimes.

The Servo Six Board itself is pretty great, though. You can control six separate servos with it and the code to differentiate between them is as simple as using the correct number, from 1 to 6, in the angle-changing code. With just the two servos included in the box, you’ll need to look at getting more servos if you want to upgrade your projects, but it won’t require any extra connections to the Raspberry Pi.

Last word

4/5

A great little kit for learning how to use servos that also has room to grow into some excellent projects. It’s very well priced too.