Will servos un-center in cold air?

Good to know. Blue $3 servos are fair weather servos only . . . not that I get many chances to fly in freezing weather ;)

I guess so! :-/

I have some Blue Hextronix 5g servos on a little 3D foamie that needs rebuilding. (Goodness knows how many times I've crashed it. =D ) When I take it apart, I'll try the freezer test on those. :)
 

nawoj

Junior Member
SCIENCE!

very interesting. i wouldnt think the temperature of the electronics would cause that much deviation. but there we have it.
 

Craftydan

Hostage Taker of Quads
Staff member
Moderator
Mentor
Nawoj,

Servos receive their commands by measuring a pulse width -- how long a signal is high. The longer the pulse, the farther it turns the arm. problem is how do you measure time? if they used electrical parts insensitive to temperature, like a quartz crystal oscillator, it would have a very stable time measurement to know when the pulse started and stopped.

For the cheap blue servo, it's using a simple timing circuit -- probably not much more than a resistor-capacitor oscillator -- that is cheap but won't keep time well. since the clock runs slow in extreme cold, it thinks that medium duration pulse is now a long pulse, and your servo starts wandering.

The better servo likely has a nicer timing circuit that can ignore the cold and keep good time, so it stays rock solid.

moral of the story? watch out for cheap servos in extreme temperature changes -- better yet, leave the cheap servos out of the snow plane.
 
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Since I didn't much like these servos anyway, I decided to take one apart.

I was surprised to see how long the screws were.

IMG_20140115_191723.jpg

There is a single KC2462 chip on one side. (Can you actually believe I read those minuscule letters??)

IMG_20140115_191846.jpg

And a bunch of resistors and capacitors on the other side.

IMG_20140115_192111.jpg

I'm not sure if the timing is in a resistor-capacitor circuit, or if it's in the chip. The chip's datasheet in Chinese.

I also found a thread about servo controller ICs. The NE544 is supposedly a similar chip.

http://electronics.stackexchange.co...i-understand-a-servo-well-enough-to-build-one

And yeah... I'm spending way too much time on this. :p
 

augernaught

Augernaught
Well this all might have just saved me a ton of grief...
I bought 20 of these Tower Pro 9g servos and was going to put 6 of them in
a DTF scratch build I have put way to much time and effort into.
I had hoped to get in some test flights this winter if we got a break in the weather,
and even bought some park flyer skis for it if need be.
No matter what, it still would be freezing cold outside around here.
I may try to duplicate this test on my batch of servos,
but right now my confidence in them for flying this winter is sub-zero!
I am sad about this situation, but real glad it got brought up.
 

pgerts

Old age member
Mentor
yeah, it would be interesting to see if the hextronic servos bixler uses does this too.
I have had no problems with the HXT servos, really cold weather or "normal cold" summer ;-) BUT they are another dollar each...