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Bus Servo Draw Bot

I wanted to complete a start to finish project with the LX-16A bus servos to do a complete review of their viability for the type of mechatronics projects I do. The low price of the LewanSoul bus servos make them a competitive option over digital servos. I chose to do a remake of the Line-Us clone drawing machine because I would not need to spend too much design time and it would be a good 1:1 comparison with digital servos. Since the bus servos are quite a bit larger, I decided to scale up the machine by 1.5x.

Made My Own Brackets.

I started by buying one servo and it came with brackets. When I went to get more, I noticed the price was lower. I did not realize I was getting these without brackets. These are the brackets you get with the more complete kit.

I requested some 3D models from LewanSoul. They were only able to provide 2D DXF files, but they were easy to convert in Fusion 360. This allowed me to 3D print some brackets. It actually worked out quite well because I was able to thicken up the brackets and integrate some captive square nuts.

They mounted easily to the servos and were plenty strong for this project.

Servo Arms

I made two arms and one short cam for the Z. They were about 4mm thick and had a little pocket that slid over the standard round actuator. They screwed on with the screws that come with the servos. Before mounting anything I turned on the servos and moved them to the center of the range. This put the arms at a known angle.

Support Bracket and Base

The support bracket holds all three servos and there are 2 pockets on the bottom for some shaft bushings.

The base has two shafts pressed into it.

The shafts slide into the bushings and there is a spring to hold the parts together.  The spring prevents the pieces from separating and also provides a little extra pull down force in case the shafts bind a little. The cam provides about 6mm of lift.

Final Assembly

The servos are mounted to the support bracket.

The wires are connected to the servos. They just daisy chain from one servo to the next.

The remaining links are then connected.

Testing

Here is a video of the first run.

Results

I think these are a good alternative to digital servos. They are very strong, easy to mount and accurate. Depending on the design of the controller, using a simple UART might be easier than having multiple PWM signals or extra hardware. The servo’s size might be larger than some machines need but that comes with the higher power.

Source Code

Some people have asked for the source code. Here is what I have. I just tweaked something I had to be good enough for this demo. I can’t offer support for it other than a few quick questions asked on this blog post.

Assembly Model

all I have is this partial STEP File

 

 

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