Servomaster

What is Servomaster?

Servomaster is a platform and hardware Independent RC servo controller driver.

Mission Statement

Servos are commonly used in radio controlled modeling and robotics applications. More and more vendors are manufacturing hardware servo controllers that can be controlled by a personal computer or embedded hardware. Initial list consisted of now defunct FerretTronics FT639 & FT 649, PhidgetServo, Scott Edwards Electronics, Inc. (Seetron) SSC, some PIC16x84 based; later came Pololu and Parallax; much more are out there now.

However, almost all of them (with notable exceptions ), being in the hardware manufacturing business, care little about providing a consistent interface for the servos and controllers. This is understandable, but disappointing, because all the servos are just about the same, and the basic functionality of the controllers is just about the same.

This can and is being fixed, right here.

What Exactly Is Offered

  • Uniform set of platform and hardware independent abstractions representing servos and servo controllers;
  • Motion transitions and transformations;
  • Way to introspect and perform capabilities discovery on your hardware;
  • Generic serial and USB implementation, suitable for extension for virtually any hardware;
  • Growing set of concrete hardware drivers.

How To Stay In Touch

DIY Zoning blog has a dedicated Servomaster section. Subscribing to its RSS Feed is the best way to stay aware of updates.

New releases can be found at SourceForge Downloads Page.

Brief History

ServoMaster was created as a complimentary project necessary to satisfy the needs of another project, DIY Zoning. Being lazy (hate to rewrite the same code ten times), I decided to just make it generic from the very beginning. It turned out to be fun. Then, Chester showed up, and it started to be really fun ;)