I’m a newbie to all this so, please be gentle. I also have little programming or electronics knowledge, I am good mechanically. I want to mount a servo motor to what will be a head, where the bolt now sits in the picture. This will then be mounted via a female thread on the body. The head will weigh approximately 2 to 3 kg so I was thinking of a servo motor with metal gears like they use in off road radio control cars, directly mounted to the body, probably fitting the servo shaft directly onto a bolt into the female thread. I am hoping to get a simple programmable controller, suitable for someone with my limited skills.
I want to set a program in it and leave it to do its thing.
It has been suggested that I log on here and ask for help, any would be appreciated.
I need help with a suitable servo motor possibly some sort of mechanism to join the head to the body, allowing it to turn side to side, and a controller that is simple to program.
That looks very doable, but I’d avoid mounting the whole 2–3 kg head directly off the servo shaft. Hobby servo output shafts are great for positioning, but not great as the main structural element.
Mechanically, I’d make the head sit on a proper bearing or bushing so the body carries the weight, then have the servo only provide the turning force. A short linkage arm, belt, gear, or crank between the servo horn and the rotating head would be much kinder to the servo than bolting the head straight onto the spline.
For the servo itself, something like the 25 kg high-torque waterproof digital servo is the sort of range I’d start looking at. The key number is torque in kg·cm: if the head’s weight is centred over the pivot, the servo mostly fights friction; if the weight is offset, the torque requirement rises quickly.
For a beginner-friendly controller, I’d look at a Raspberry Pi Pico H (with protoboard), or a Servo 2040 if you want an all-in-one servo controller board. The Servo 2040 is probably the neater fit for higher-power servos, as it’s designed around driving servos from a separate servo power supply.
The big beginner trap is power: don’t run a large servo from the Pico/USB port. Use a separate servo supply rated for the servo voltage and at least a few amps peak, with the controller and servo grounds connected together.
If you can share roughly how far side-to-side it needs to turn — e.g. 45°, 90°, 180° — and whether the head’s weight is centred over the pivot, that’ll narrow the servo/mechanism choice a lot.
Liam
