Arduino Single Channel RC Transmitter

Projects General Guidance
1

Evening,

I am working on a project to produce a model aircraft, as part of this project the control system is required to control the motor only, there are no additional servos etc on the aircraft. The motor is three phase and will be controlled by an Electronic Speed Controller which in turn connects to a battery and radio receiver.

Generally a radio transmitter of the same brand is used to control the model, however as I only need one channel and would prefer to use a power knob rather than the lever on more controllers I am looking at using an Arduino to transmit to the radio receiver to control the aircraft based on the input from a power knob.

Do you know if this has been done before? What equipment is required? How easy is it to accomplish?

Your help is appreciated :slight_smile:

Andy.

2

I'd suggest that you use the matching transmitter, and only replace the lever by a pot. You can make an Arduino behave like a pot, with some external circuitry.

3

Not sure where to get a transmitter to fit to the Arduino? Do you know where I could get one?

What do you mean by pot? :slight_smile:

4

What range do you need?
A simple SPI based transmitter with extended range like this might do:

Perform an analogRead() of a potentiometer (pot) to return a 0-1023 result,
map that (lookup table perhaps) into whatever value you want to send to the plane.