Powerful Continuous Rotation WiFi Servo Winch

thingiverse

This is a servo winch with a few Watts of power. This winch can easily raise and lower 1 kg. This device uses optical sensors to measure the rotation of the shaft and uses a motor and microcontroller to control the position of the winch to within 1/24th rotation (about 5mm in this instance.) A WiFi-enabled microcontroller (WeMos D1 mini) is used so that the position of the winch can be controlled from a browser e.g. smartphone. You can also command the servo through a USB serial connection. A standard H bridge motor driver is used to power the motor. In the pictures I'm using 1/2 of a dual H bridge which happens to contain a 5V regulator suitable for powering the D1. A small printed circuit board carries 2 infrared photo-interrupters to make an optical rotary quadrature encoder. Gerber files for the PCB are provided. NOTE that PLA is not opaque to infrared. I had to paint my rotary encoder blades black to get the photo-interrupter to work reliably. The model can be changed to accommodate other motors, shafts, gear ratios, etc. You model the parts and the part alignment and the housing is generated automatically. ALL source code is on github. If you're interested in following this project use github: https://github.com/jesseparker/servowinch https://youtu.be/ne80NvGg7cM