6 Volt Futaba Servo controlled by a 5V Arduino

arduinoservo

I've been able to hook up a Futaba S3003 servo directly to my Arduino and it works perfectly. However, when I power it with an external 6 volt DC power supply (instead of the Arduino's onboard 5V) it fails to work.

I'm assuming I need to translate the 5v "language" of the Arduino to the 6v "language" that the servo now uses. Pretty new to this. Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

EDIT: My question, generalized, is how do I use an external power supply, that's more than 5V, with a servo and control it with an Arduino?

Here's a photo of how it's setup (and working).
Running on 5V

Best Answer

The servo on the external 6V source may be failing to work becasue you failed to interconnect the GND of the MCU board to the GND of the external supply.