If you've laser cut your parts or purchased one of our kits you'll really want to get it built. But first you need to complete a vital step. We need to calibrate the servos. Here we'll use our Brains Board, which is an Arduino compatible, but you can use anything that will generate a PWM signal to calibrate them. There's MeArm code available for Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black, Sparkcore and Espruino.

Using our Brains Board it will come programmed to go to the default positions. Which are 90, 90, 90 and 25 for the servos for the centre, left, right, and claw respectively. Mark a centre line onto the spindle and body of the servo and you can also mark them c, l, r, and c or by another system that will mean something to you.

Don't be tempted to turn them by hand, the torque provided by your mighty strength could strip the servo gears. For the same reason it's really important that you do this process before building your MeArm.

If you're using and Arduino then the setup shown in the image above and this code will give you the same result. We use Codebender for our demo code and would love a tshirt. So please use this link if you're going to open an account.

The most important part to realise in setting up your servos is that you're not able to power them via your microcontroller. You need a separate 5-6V 2A power supply, with a common ground to the micro controller. Check out the Arduino set up image for more info.