A man wanted to create a robotic dog as a present for his son. He bought some digital servos, a microcontroller, and Lipo batteries. However, he found it difficult to control the smart servos with an Arduino processor. To solve this problem, we developed a driver board that can easily and quickly drive digital servos such as AX-12 with an Arduino directly, just like using the Arduino official servo library.

With this smart Arduino digital servo shield and Dynamixel AX series servos, it’s easy to drive multiple servos with a daisy chain connection with an Arduino board like the Arduino Uno. You can use this setup to build a robotic dog, hexapod, or any other robot with powerful servos.

This shield integrates a half-duplex circuit inside, which means that the transmit wire from UART is connected to all of the AX-12 servos. If a command is sent over the wire without a servo ID, all of the servos will receive the command. If the message contains the destination servo ID, only one servo matching that ID number will receive it.

These servos can be linked by a serial bus, which can connect up to 200+ servos. Each unit can provide feedback on its position, rotation velocity, torque, current, motor temperature, and more. The servo can rotate all around, and the velocity can be controlled, acting as a gear motor. This feature enables it to work as a motor of wheeled robots or tracked robots.

NOTE: The new batch servo AX-12 requires a default reset before altering the working method. You can see it was written in the sample sketch.