OpenServo

I think the OpenServo project is pretty cool! My first scheme on how to do Touch was to read the error voltage from a servo driving the finger to indicate how hard someone was pressing on it. Because of the opacity of the servo circuit, I pretty quickly gave up on this idea, and went with pressure sensitive resistors on the fingertip.

Now with OpenServo, I could use the actual position register and/or the back EMF register to try to determine position in a touch-over-IP solution, without having to deal with any funky pressure sensors.

Whether this would actually work or not is unclear, as you would need to apply enough touch pressure to either move the servo at least one notch out of position, or enough to increase the servo power or back EMF reading. But the price is right!

You know what would go good with the OpenServo? The PIC-MINI-WEB! At $40.95 you get an Ethernet PHY, TCP/IP stack, and it would be easy to I2C over to the OpenServo. Cheap PHY2PHY goodness!