Step 2: The Servo Drive

To move the Carousel, we use a standard hobby servo with a rubber wheel on it that rests against the Carousel wooden wheel.

First, we modified it for continuous rotation. You can find out how to do that in other Instructables and numerous web sites. You can even buy pre-modified ones at a lot of places.

Then, we attached a Lite Flite wheel to the servo horn, and made a bracket to let it swing back and forth. To attach the wheel, we drilled the hole in the center of the wheel (the hub) a bit larger to allow for the servo horn screw. Then we sanded down the hub ridge, and used a couple self-tapping #4 bolts in pre-drilled holes to hold the horn to the wheel.

We made a custom hinge to allow the wheel to move back and forth to compensate for irregularities in the platform circumference.

We used a cup hook on the base and a small spring to the servo to keep the tension on. The spring goes from the cup hook to the servo mounting holes opposite the custom hinge. We did try a rubber-band before the spring. It worked fine, but after a couple months it broke, so the spring should require less maintenance.

(Note that the pictures below were taken before we used the kitchen turntable, so that is missing from the pictures, but is in the final project.)













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