Controlling a RC controller

Projects General Guidance
1

I recently bought the Arduino UNO(its coming in the mail and I'm giddy like a school girl...) and I have been doing all sorts of studying just waiting for it.

I know I need to start small and master the basics, but I'd like to know the extent of what I can do

I have a small remote control helicopter and I would like to to control it with my Arduino. I had a few theories on how I could do this:

  1. take apart the RC controller and use the Arduino to out a signal that emulates what the two control sticks do

  2. build a arduino that outs puts on the same RC freq as the helicopter.

From the research I've done, I believe the second one is possible, but I've really been dying to take apart this helicopter controller..

Thank you in advanced for your info!

2

what kind of controller?

how big is the helicopter?

if it is infrared, you can certainly just replicate the protocol directly

if it's big enough to use real servos, then you can get a 2.4 GHz transmitter and receiver kit, and feed PPM pulses into the transmitter

anything else will require you to do more research

3

Thank you!

http://www.google.com/products/catalog?q=rc+helicopter&hl=en&prmd=imvnsr&psj=1&resnum=2&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1280&bih=610&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=shop&cid=7530222225704393402&sa=X&ei=IUjMT-sYx57YBbi1pdwL&ved=0CK0BEOYNMAA

I'm not sure thats exactly it, but its about the same look and setup.

Its RC.

Yea I've been researching quite a bit, I just don't exactly know what to look for. that is why I'm here!

Is there no way to just take out the two control sticks and instead send voltage to them from the arduino to emulate the sticks?

Sorry if this is a noob question, like I said my Uno isn't here yet and I'm just gather info :slight_smile:

4

you can directly control it through infrared if you reverse engineer the protocol and encoding

of course you can also do as you said, inject a signal into the joysticks, the easiest way is to just use the analog out pins, add a resistor-capacitor LPF on it, and connect it to the tap pin of the joystick potentiometers

other ways include using a DAC, or a digital potentiometer

5

Thank you again, your information is exactly what I'm looking for.

I have opted to go with taking apart the transmitter on a old Land to sea RC car I found.

How ever,when I took off the case, I was interested to see what look like pressure activated(sorry, pushing down the button simply completes the circuit) buttons for the left and right wheel control. Its been a long time since I played with the toy, but from the looks of it the two control sticks control the left and right side .

Im not sure how I would interface my arduino with this, I had planned on testing it, but it has yet to arrive.

Included are some pictures of the toy and the joy stick its self

800×532 9.3 KB

Any ideas?

Did any one else have these as a kid? They were loads of fun, even if they sunk quite a bit in the water.

As im charging the battery, I'm not entirely sure it even still works. But I have loads of RC cars around the house, so I'm not worried.

6

thegreyfox:
pushing down the button simply completes the circuit

I didn't have one of those, but I imagine they would have been great fun.

If the control is just operating a couple of make/break switches, you may be able to replace those with a couple of transistors driven from the Arduino. If necessary, a more conventional relay driver circuit would certainly do the job.