E-Flite T-28 Trojan Speed Run
Did a speed run of the T-28. Clocked 94 mph, with the help of 13 mph wind. Battery: 4s, 2200mah, 45C.
How to Become a Better RC Pilot – A Personal Study, Part 1
I’m trying to get back in to RC airplanes 20 years after moving away from an area where I became an expert at slope soaring. I’m finding powered flight to be a whole lot different and am yet unsuccessful at adapting. The increase mass and ground speed of powered flight has created a very expensive problem: catastrophic crashes. My slope soaring planes lasted forever, both in terms of flight times and durability of the plane. In returning to the hobby,…
Traxxas Gearing Chart
I can never find this exact gearing chart online when I need it, so I’ve taken a pic of the one that came with my Slash and uploading it here for posterity. Good for the Rustler, Bandit, and Stampede.
Valuable Lessons on Autonomous Boats
Testing is crucial. These are my notes from things I learned on today’s autonomous boat tests. Do not program GPS coordinates at 5am! This is critical. The boat went out to the middle of the lake and stopped. It took me several moments to realize it did exactly what I asked it to do. I failed to enter in return coordinates. The shoreline is dynamic. Do not trust Google Maps, even in satellite view, when getting GPS values close to…
Programmable Headlights on an RC Car
Experimenting with smart LEDs on an RC Car… These are Adafruit Pixie Chainable Smart LEDs and an Arduino Uno. On the car I replaced both channel’s servo cables with Y-harnesses. Plugging one end of each harness back in to the servo/ESC, the other end is used to connect to Arduino PWM input pins. Reading those values and using that information to control the LEDs. Adafruit Pixie LEDs are chained together but individually assignable to any color by the program. This…
How to use a Spektrum DX4C’s Switches in Arduino
These are my notes on how to use a remote control’s switches to control extra features of a robot. In my case, I have an autonomous rover and would like to build a switch to press on the remote control to stop the rover and take manual control over it. I used a Spektrum DX4C transceiver. First, I configured the Spektrum DX4C profile model in memory so that Channel 3 will be used as a switch. To do this: Press the…
How to Arm E-Flight ESC with Arduino and without Guessing
If you read one of my first posts here at remotebits.com, on arming an ESC, I happened up the solution by accident. Today I wanted to try to arm an RC airplane ESC and it occurred to me that I didn’t have to guess how to do it. Disclaimer: use this information at your own risk. I am not responsible for any damage. A more elegant solution was to read the PWM values first while turning on the transceiver and…
How to Read the Traxxas Radio PWM Signals using an Arduino
These are my notes on how to read the PWM servo signal coming from the Traxxas TQ receiver. Disclaimer: use this information at your own risk. I am not responsible for any damage. RC car radio receivers communicate with the steering servo and electronic speed controller using electrical pulses called PWM(pulse width modulation). Using an Arduino, we are able to capture these pulses and print their values out to the Serial Monitor. These numbers represent the width of the electrical…