Raspberry Pi and the Duinotech Servo (SG90) Pan and Tilt Bracket

Building the Duinotech Pan and Tilt Bracket (Part 1)

As part of our mission to build Alexa M (a Raspberry Pi based robot with voice recognition), we have decided to include an ultrasonic sensor and/or camera. To that end we will include a pan/tilt bracket with a couple of servos.

The kit we chose was the duinotech Pan and Tilt Action Camera Bracket Mount for 9G Servos. This is cheap and designed to operate with two of the TowerPro SG90 MicroServo's.

While they are cheap, construction details are best described as scant (or perhaps missing). You do get a before and after shot, but the after shot only shows one servo.

It looks like Adafruit supply a similar unit, so here are the construction details from them.

Assembling the Base (Pan Unit)

• Insert the servo into one side of the pan bracket.
• Make sure that the servo shaft is at the opposite side from the pivot point for the tilt bracket.
• Assemble the second side of the pan bracket to enclose the servo.
• Attach the two halves of the pan bracket using two of the small screws.

• Attach the 4-armed servo horn to the servo shaft using one of the short screws as shown.
• Use one of the shorter screws to attach the base to the servo shaft. The longer mounting screws packed with some servos will damage the servo if screwed in too far.
• Align the servo horn so that the longer arms are vertical when the servo is at the midpoint of its rotation - don't worry too much about this you will need to move it when you calibrate the servo.
• Attach the base to the servo horn, using 4 of the smallest screws as shown. I had to trim the horn so it would fit in the base.

Before assembling the tilt bracket in the next post we will test our pan servo with the Raspberry Pi and create a servo library that we can reuse.