OpenServo.com

[GRIENlord]

Hello everybody! I am new to the site www.openservo.com
Could anyone, please, advise if there is a lot of
spam and unscrupulous advertising. Can I trust
all this information, which is present at this forum?
Sorry for stupid questions, I just really want know which
information I should trust or even pay attention.

EDIT: User deleted as was spam bot. Post left for Mike's response to make any sense. - ginge

[mpthompson]

Welcome to OpenServo. This site is basically watering hole for people who are interested in modifying off-the shelf RC servos or home brewed mechanics with new electronics and software. We have a number of sample OpenServo implementations documented on this site that myself and others have done. They do work and interesting features and capabilities can be added to a servo. However, that being said, the things you will find on this site at this time are still highly experimental and may or may not work as intended or described.

To get the most out of the OpenServo at this time, it certainly does help to be fairly competent in electronics and programming. Jay Ragsdale can provide you with pre-built PCBs for servos which helps eliminate building very small boards with very small surface mount components, but you'll still need to connect the PCB to the servo hardware and program the firmware yourself. Certainly not very difficult, but it could be daunting to someone working with a soldering iron or microcontroller programmer for the first time. Overtime this will hopefully get easier for people who just want to use a functioning OpenServo, but for right now things can be a little, shall we say, raw.

We have had problems in the past with SPAM on the Wiki and Forum portions of the OpenServo web site, but with a recent site upgrade we hope to take steps to reduce this problem. Until now, we've done our best to try to chase the spammers, but the Internet is very big and we are a small site run by enthusiasts. We try to remove the junk as we see it. Other than Jay Ragsdale graciously offering people pre-built PCBs at a decent price, there hasn't really been other commercial activity associated with the OpenServo up to the point that I'm aware of.

Finally, should you trust the information on this forum? Hmmm. I think you'll have to draw your own conclusions based on your knowledge and background. We all have various levels of educational and professional backgrounds and sometimes it can be hard to tell opinions based on wishful thinking from those based on years of experience with control theory, electronic design and software engineering.

Hopefully that should give you some idea what OpenServo is about. Please don't hesitate to ask any further questions as we are all a pretty friendly bunch around here.

-Mike

[ginge]

Mike, this user is a spam bot. Shortly after you posted this reply, this user changed their signature and URl to a spam site. I will leave your reply in for prosperity.

Barry
_________________
http://www.headfuzz.co.uk/
http://www.robotfuzz.co.uk/

[mpthompson]

I should have known better. I'm obviously not too sophisticated on these things.

-Mike