Phidgets has released the 1066 Phidget Advanced Servo 1-Motor, which allows users to control the position, velocity and acceleration of one RC servo motor.
The PWM to the servo is updated 50 times per second and has a resolution of 0.007.
'As we were designing the new product, we decided to go past building a basic controller and add functionality that allows smoother operation of the servo motor,' said Chester Fitchett, chief executive of Phidgets.
The 1066 also measures the current being consumed by the servo motor.
This feature is useful to assert if the motor is attached and functioning (not consuming any current) or if it is stalled (consuming maximum current).
The 1066 is powered solely by the USB cable and does not require any additional power source.
It can drive servo motors of up to 450mA.
Product specifications include: pulse code period of 20ms typical, maximum of 25ms; minimum pulse width is 83.3ns; maximum pulse width is 2.7307ms; output impedance (control) is 600 ohms; maximum motor current surge is 1.6A; and device current consumption is 36mA max.
'Unlike a lot of our competitor's products that require their users to write some firmware code in order to use their sensor, we are completely plug and play,' said Bernard Rousseau, director of marketing.
Users can program Phidgets using an application programming interface (API) that is supported under Windows (2000, XP, Vista), Windows CE, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Users can write programs in Visual Basic, VB.Net, C#, C/C++, Flash/Flex, Java, Labview, Matlab, Actionscript 3.0 and Cocoa.
Phidgets also provides programming examples for all its products to help programmers write their own programs.
The API Libraries as well as the examples and the documentation are available at no charge on the Phidgets website.
