After repairing the robotic hand project, the most noticeable flaw was the nest of wires on the receiver. Every servo motor has three wires, with five fingers that means there are fifteen leads going into the breadboard. From there five additional wires need to run to the Arduino for signal control. This leaves this sort of mess:
To solve this mess, I jumped into Circuit Maker, a free PCB design tool from Altium. After selecting my parts I designed this very simple schematic:
With the schematic drawn up I created a PCB file and placed all the components. Normally, routing should be done by hand, but in a circuit as simple as this it really saves a good chunk of time. After running the auto routing I had this:
Each finger will have a 3-pin header, similar to the Power header, and all the signal wires will go from the 5-pin header at the top (labeled OUTPUT). Since all the servo headers will plug directly into the board most of the excess wires will be eliminated.
-Andrew