A Body of Its Own

After testing it with eight servos, I decided it's time to actually give it a proper body. So I took my trusty screwdriver, put together the servo horns to form legs, and glued it all with two-sided tape to a piece of plastic. Then I switched it on, and observed blue smoke from the servos.

I immediately switched it off, disconnected the smoking servo and tried it again, to see if the board still works. It worked, but after a moment there was blue smoke from a second servo, and it stopped working. And the power switch became very easy to move.

So I took a closer look at the burned servos. Sure enough, the insulation was all burned near where the wires go into the servo, and all three leads were touching. I took a look at the remaining servos. Most of them were fine, but two had naked wires close to where they enter the servo -- the insulation started about 1mm farther. So that worked fine as long as the wires didn't move, but wiggle them around a bit, and it explodes.

I replaced the power switch and the two burned servos, and I put a drop of glue on every servo where the wires come in, to avoid this in the future. Now all that is left is to adjust the servo horn positions and program this thing.