I think the power supply should be fine but i will try a large capacitor when i get home to see if that helps at all. I also have a PC PSU laying around that i can test with and ive run servos from that before so i know its clean enough.
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I think the power supply should be fine but i will try a large capacitor when i get home to see if that helps at all. I also have a PC PSU laying around that i can test with and ive run servos from that before so i know its clean enough.
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The Master , You are missing the point... I said look at the +5 volts running the servos, not the main PSU... The servos are operated by +5 volts arn't they?
Dave Purola,
N8NTA
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So even if the main PSU is very clean the power after the regulators might not be? Would that happen because the servos are drawing more power than the regulators are happy with?
Last edited by The Master; - 3rd August 2010 at 15:01.
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The hot servos are probably due to having them in a small enclosure with several hot regulators and heatsinks.
Twitching & noise from servos is normally due to improper pulse timing, or insufficient power supply.
Most regulators have thermal shut-off built-in, and will drop-off if they get too hot, or the load attempts to draw more current than they can provide. And the hotter a regulator gets, the less efficient it becomes, so it can't provide anywhere near its rated max output.
A quick way to test this would be to just remove the servos and regulators from the skull, and bench-test everything. If the regulators still get hot, try placing a small fan close by aimed at the heatsinks.
If everything runs cool, and you still hear noise, or see twitching from the servos, then check your pulse timing, and output of each regulator with a load on each servo.
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I think the root problem is the twitching. Ive seen other people do the same kind of setup and they didnt mention an overheating problem. If the servos are constantly moving then they will be drawing a lot more power which obviously makes the regulators hot. The regulators arnt getting very very hot. The heat is mostly coming from the servos. I think thats because the motors are constantly moving backwards and forwards and generating a lot of heat.
During initial tests with the special servo controller i operated them in the enclosed space and had no heat issues at all so im pretty confident its because of the twitching. One thing i didnt do before was test on this power supply. I will add the capacitors to see if they make any difference
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From post #1
From post #5I also have 4 voltage regulators (1 for each servo) with heatsinks and they are pretty hot too
From post #13I dont think the regulators are the main problem. They are getting quite hot but they have heatsinks on them
What happened? are they getting cooler?The regulators arnt getting very very hot.
Can you provide the specs for the motors? Make and/or model ?
Dave
Always wear safety glasses while programming.
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