Coding your first servo motor on MakeCode

Photo by Kilimanjaro STUDIOz on Unsplash

There is no need to have a servo motor for this activity. We will use the emulator and the servo extension in MakeCode to visualize the result of our code.

Open MakeCode and follow along or read the goals of this activity and try to do it as a challenge.

Goals

• Have the micro:bit position the servo motor to 90 degrees at the start of the application.

• When the user presses the A button, change the angle to 0-degree.

• When the user presses the B button, change the angle to 180-degree.

• Reset the angle to 0-degree, when the user presses A and B at the same time.

Our solution

Add the Servo Extension to your MakeCode project

• To start, we need to enable the Servo extension in MakeCode. To do so, click on Extensions.

• Add the servo extension from the list

Now you have access to a new group of blocks and the emulator includes a virtual servo motor. They provide different ways of moving the servo.

Initialize servo motor at a 90-degree angle

The following code will initialize the servo motor at a 90-degree angle as soon as the micro:bit gets electricity (when it starts).

Test on the emulator and see how the servo moves its pointer to the expected position.

Press Button A, B and A+B to change positions

All these three actions follow the same pattern. We introduce a block that will trigger action and depending on the button pressed, we change to the desired angle

Button A to 0 degrees

Button B to 180 degrees

Buttons A+B to the initial position (90 degrees)

Test on the emulator and see how the servo moves its pointer to the expected position when you press different buttons.

The next tool we are learning about is called a Neopixel. See you in the next section.