Simple Radio Controlled Car

There’s nothing much to say about this, no micro-controller or programming or any fancy stuff involved… it’s just that I’ve always wanted to build a simple RC car for my kids…

Arduino, when the Servo library is not good enough…

 

I went back to try and finish this ball balancing project, but after some improvements I started to get frustrated by the fact that the servos kept being “jittery”.

Time for my new and shiny servo tester I thought… ! It turned out I was seeing the same problem.

ServoTester

Here is a really small side project that I developed while working on something else…

I had to test a RC speed controller that I wanted to use to control an electric car window motor, and for the 100th time I was facing the same dilemma: find 8 batteries for my remote control, dismount the RX part from the quadcopter and use that, OR grab the Arduino and write quickly some code to generate the corresponding signals ? Neither of which was actually particularly handy…

So I finally decided to build a small stand alone servo tester :

Physical Face Following with OpenCV on Android

Here I am again, less than 2 days after my latest post… this must be the shortest delay ever between 2 consecutive posts.

 

First of all I hope you guys will approve of my choice of face to follow ! 🙂   The English title is “All about my mother” by Almodóvar, which I’ve never actually seen, but my wife tells me it’s a really good movie… !

 

Android – IOIO – RC Servo (or ESC)

This is a sequel to my first Hello World example with the IOIO / Android setup….

Android + IOIO controlling a RC servo

Graupner R700 FM receiver – get the PPM signal

This must have already been discussed on plenty of other forums, but here I am, I want to use my Graupner FM transmitter / receiver with my quadcopter.

As Jordi from DIY Drones says “Intercept the PPM signal is the best way to obtain all the channels from any receiver, for a lot of reasons. The first one is performance, and the second is the simplicity (in code =P).”

First of all, here’s a quite useful diagram that explains well how the PPM works, and the relationship between this signal and the individual channels:

RC Receiver Timing Diagram

The Graupner/JR R700 FM receiver is quite easy to hack.