Suwaneeguy said:
Dear professor, I was relating to RC servos as the person was asking about.
I did not go into the 30,000 pages of detail needed to explain it thoroughly as that answer is not within the scope of this forum.
You want a basic answer, I give you one. I do not feel it necessary to get into all the inner technicalities.
I
might buy that argument
if your description (which is inaccurate) was any shorter than the one HarryT posted 3 posts above yours which described a servo perfectly. This proves that you do not need "30,000 pages of detail", nor was I suggesting that you should've included it. But if you
are going to shorten it to a more digestible 200 words or so, at the very least those 200 words should be accurate. And by beginning
your description with "in simpler terms...", you give the impression that you are ignoring, if not out-and-out
refuting the descriptions before yours (including Harry's... which is accurate and deserved no refuting).
Suwaneeguy said:
Did you watch the video?
Explain how the servo responded to the controller stick when the servo was not even attached to an aircraft.
Ergo, the servo is a receiver and cares less what it is attached to.
I did, in fact, watch the video. I'd seen it before, but watched it again when Mitch posted it above. Other than the stilted presentation style of Mr. Weekly, it's an excellent video. As far as me "explaining how the servo responded to the controller stick when the servo was not even attached to an aircraft"... no one ever said a servo must be attached to an
aircraft. But if you look closely, the orange wires leading to the servo are clearly visible at the bottom of the video. These wires are attached to, you guessed it, an RC receiver attached to a control circuit board. In your own words... you wanted a basic answer, I give you one.
Suwaneeguy said:
Yes there are servos elsewhere in the real world that operate without radio waves.
But that is not what the original question was asking about.
In short, servos themselves do not operate on "radio waves". None. Period. They
all have to be attached to a receiver and a control board if they are to be used in an RC situation (there are some control modules that have a servo and a control board, maybe even a receiver, built into the same housing, but the servo is still just one component). And to describe them any other way does a disservice to the thread and the OP. What if the OP had taken your description literally, run out and bought a servo, and then wondered why it wasn't responding to the radio control he was trying to use to activate it? Nowhere in the OP is there a question about radio controlled servos, specifically. In fact, the question seems very much more about servos
in general.