Continuous servo or regular DC motor

Community General Discussions
1

So I was watching following video on youtube on how to build a basic robot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OT1tr--yNg&list=PLnesnfu5SD7Zj68TTAQ8OByOe4m7za7RH

I noticed he is using 2 servo's for the wheels.
As a beginner I was quite confused with this. From what I have read and seen so far I thought servo's were used when you need precision and work the angles.

Why would you use continous servo's for regular wheels when you don't really need precision or work the angles?

The only reason I came up with is that those servo's are more easily controlled with the Arduino as you can control the servo's without having to put some sort of transistor circuit in place to let the motors respond on the Arduino.
Not sure if that's the reason why he picked servo's.

I currently have  2 DC motors so if I want to control them through the Arduino I would need to put transistors in place and connect a digital pin to the base of the transistor while the motor is powered with an external battery pack. 

So it seems easier to work with servo's in that case but is that the only reason?

2

Being old, I will chime in.

Continuous Rotation (CR) servos have a couple more benefits. For one, they have built in mount points, and, secondly, they only require a single pin for motor control. To be able to do that with DC motors driven by some kind of h-bridge would require more components.

3

Thanks all for the

Thanks all for the replies. 

So if servo’s are so great. Why would we use regular DC motors? 

I currently have 2 DC motors which I will use for my first robot. 
WIll buy some servo’s for the next robot though :slight_smile:

@chickenparmi: great tutorial. Learned a lot from it. I didin’t know making strange faces was so important!  

4

I suggest Geared DC Motors!

I suggest geared DC motors are better for they are not as expensive as the servos, you have to sacrifice some torque though. You can use L293D or the L298N like chickenparmi said to make the circuitry simple, or if you want to work with basic electronics, you can use transistors or MOSFETS :slight_smile: