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Control Servo Motors

This example uses:

Open Live Script

This example shows how to use the MATLAB® Support Package for Arduino® Hardware to control a hobby servo motor.

Hardware setup

Connect an FS5106B servo motor to Arduino hardware,

  1. Connect the power wire (usually red) to the 5V pin.

  2. Connect the ground wire (usually black) to the ground pin.

  3. Connect the signal wire (usually orange) to digital pin 4.

Create servo object and calibrate the motor

Create an arduino object and include the Servo library. 

a = arduino();

Or, you can explicitly specify it in the Libraries Name-Value pair at creation of arduino object.

clear a;
a = arduino('COM4', 'Uno', 'Libraries', 'Servo');

Create a Servo object.

s = servo(a, 'D4')
s = 
  Servo with properties:

                 Pin: 'D4'
    MinPulseDuration: 5.44e-04 (seconds)
    MaxPulseDuration: 2.40e-03 (seconds)

Check your servo motor's data sheet pulse width range values to calibrate the motor to rotate in expected range. This example uses 700e-6 and 2300e-6 for the motor to move from 0 to 180 degrees.

clear s;
s = servo(a, 'D4', 'MinPulseDuration', 700e-6, 'MaxPulseDuration', 2300e-6)
s = 
  Servo with properties:

                 Pin: 'D4'
    MinPulseDuration: 7.00e-04 (seconds)
    MaxPulseDuration: 2.30e-03 (seconds)

Write and read Servo position

Change the shaft position of the servo motor from 0(minimum) to 1(maximum) with 0.2, e.g 36 degrees, increment. Display the current position each time the position changes.

for angle = 0:0.2:1
    writePosition(s, angle);
    current_pos = readPosition(s);
    current_pos = current_pos*180;
    fprintf('Current motor position is %d degrees\n', current_pos);
    pause(2);
end
Current motor position is 0 degrees
Current motor position is 36 degrees
Current motor position is 72 degrees
Current motor position is 108 degrees
Current motor position is 144 degrees
Current motor position is 180 degrees

Clean up

Once the connection is no longer needed, clear the associate object.

clear s a