USB Servo Control: Manufacturing Made Simpler, Smarter And Faster
Since the era of ticker tape and punch cards, the world of industrial automation has come a very long way indeed, and USB servo control, by means of a cable running between the servo mechanism in question and your laptop or PC, is now the standard, basic means of control, displaced only in instances where more mobility is needed (in which case WiFi technology may be used). USB servo control is the standard means by which experimenters and inventors at the world greatest institutes for automation technology design and innovation, such as Stanford and MIT, control their creations.
The term USB stands for ‘Universal Serial Bus’, and is a specification of both hardware connectors and software type that allows connection between mobile devices and host controller machines (which are, most frequently, personal computers). USB technology was originally conceived of as a means of making connecting external hardware into PCs much simpler and faster as a process, and is now the standard means used to connect computer peripherals, like keyboards, mice, printers, media players, external hard drives and so forth to PCs – indeed, it’s estimated that at the present moment over 2 billion USB devices are sold every year.
Thus the truly wonderful thing about USB servo control is the manner in which it allows users to easily enter new orders into servo systems. With old-school CNC tooling machines, for instance, one would have had to connect one’s computer directly to the CNC machine, networking it, to be able to transfer the kind of informational load that the installation of CAD programming for the cutting of any large or complex component would call for. Now, USB allows the much simpler transfer of information off of a static hard drive. Static externals are presently available for very little money at all, and go all the way up to devices capable of holding terabytes of information, far more space than any commercial program would ever need.
From the perspective of the home user, this amounts to the democratization of robotic technology and is probably the reason that building robots as a hobby has become so widespread of late. A standard USB servo control system will allow you to interface with dozens of RC servos, regardless of whether they were built by Vixen, Rexroth or Yaskawa.
The standard microcontroller module used in controlling such robotics is a BASIC stamp single-board computer, which generally runs the Parallax PBASIC language interpreter. It essentially obeys commands determined by the developer, which range from basic commands, such as switching on or off, to interfacing with sensors or carrying out complex maneuvers. This program’s ease of use, along with its very wide support base in terms of free applications and resources available online, is the reason that it has prospered so greatly in hobby low-volume engineering projects, as well as educational situations. Typically, all one needs to do when working with a new servo technology via USB servo control is download the software required to interface with, say, Vixen components, follow the proper procedure for its installation, and voila, the device will obey your commands.
