I’ve recently started playing with an Arduino kit I purchased a year ago (and only just now got around to unboxing). I purchased the kit from SparkFun, and it includes a motley collection of resistors, LEDs, a motor, a servo, and more.

I was fiddling around with this exercise, which uses the SoftwareServo library to control a servo. Using this library, you just pass it an angle and the library takes care of everything else, e.g. to rotate to 90 degrees you would do this:

myservo.write(90);

The exercise suggests trying to control the servo without using the library:

While it is easy to control a servo using the Arduino’s included library sometimes it is fun to figure out how to program something yourself. Try it. We’re controlling the pulse directly so you could use this method to control servos on any of the Arduino’s 20 available pins (you need to highly optimize this code before doing that).

It took me a few tries, and it looks as if the upper and lower limits for the servo pulses given in that documentation may not be 100% accurate. This is what I finally came with. As an added bonus, it writes position information to the serial port:

int incomingByte = 0;
int servo0 = 600;
int servo180 = 2100;
int inc = 20;
int pos = servo0;
int servoPin = 9;
int pulseInterval=2000;

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);     // opens serial port, sets data rate to 9600 bps
  pinMode(servoPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop() {
  int i;

  pos += inc;

  if (pos > servo180) {
    Serial.println("REVERSE!");
    pos = servo180;
    inc *= -1;
    delay(500);
  } else if (pos < servo0) {
    Serial.println("FORWARD!");
    pos = servo0;
    inc *= -1;
    delay(500);
  }

  Serial.print("pos = ");
  Serial.println(pos, DEC);

  digitalWrite(servoPin, HIGH);
  delayMicroseconds(pos);
  digitalWrite(servoPin, LOW);
  delay(20);
}

Under Linux or OS X, you could view the serial output using screen like this:

screen /dev/tty.usbmodemfd12441 9600