PIC servo control with ADC Input

I have not used PIC in a long while, as it has been replaced by the Arduino. The reasons are that I have to program the PIC at a lower level of abstraction, the PIC does not have all of the built-in convenient functionality of the Arduino, and the PIC is harder to debug.

Even so, I have programmed a servo controller with a PIC that takes in an analog value from the Arduino (via PWM, a rectifier capacitor can be placed), and translates this to a 50 Hz PWM servo signal with pulse widths ranging from 0.6 ms to 2.4 ms for the control of a HS-311 servo. If your servo requires different pulse lengths it is easy to change in the code.

The reasons for making a PIC servo controller are two:

-The PIC is much cheaper. Ordering from Microchip I can get the PIC16F690 for less than $2 a piece.

-The Arduino servo library control gets messed up when you change the timer settings. On the same Arduino I wanted to control the servos, I changed the timers so that the PWM operates at above 30 kHz.

I programmed a PIC16F690 using PicKit 2 (there is now a newer PicKit 3) and the free MPLAB IDE using the also-free HITECH compiler.

The software utilizes Timer 0 for the 50 Hz signal refresh rate and Timer 1 for the pulse length. This was done because a higher resolution of pulse width was achieved with Timer 1. Several very useful calculators for finding the Timer offset value settings to correspond to the desired times can be found by Google searching 'PIC timer calculator'. I have one that I got a few years back, but I cannot seem to find it now; maybe it updated.