We got back from CeBIT late wednesday night to drop off our printer to find that our servos had arrived from overseas! This is what our pile of 60 servos looks like:

This will allow us to keep working on our early prototyping for our loom actuation system to keep us on track for having our first production loom ready for the end of the year.

For the end of the year our pile of servos will be 10x the size so that’ll make for an interesting photo to share with you all!

We settled on the Tower MG90S for our first moderate scale trials. It’s a relatively cheap digital servo with metal gears so we figure that’s a good place to start. Our mechanism prototype will show us how well it’ll last with constant loading. Metal gears are far stronger than their nylon brethren but they tend to fail a lot more dramatically. Hopefully we don’t burn through too many of them during our tests though if we’re having a bad day we might just have to make an interesting youtube video of purposely failing a servo … for science.

With a quoted stall torque around 2kg.cm (or roughly 0.20 N.m) of torque, it should be more than enough to move the heddles up and down. With some quick maths, if our arm will be 50mm long so that means ignoring friction we can deal with 0.4N of load or 40g which will be fine for what we’re doing.