radio controlled airplane from a micro r/c car

posted Jan 22nd 2005 3:56am by Jason Striegel
filed under: misc hacks

mini r/c plane

hackaday reader dan really made my day by sending us a great hack that shows you how to turn a microsizer/bitchar-g/zipzap micro r/c car into a 2 channel airplane for a total cost of $35.

those cars cost about $10, are incredibly tiny, and you can find them everywhere. that’s definitely worth considering next time you want some sort of r/c functionality in your own hack.

update: page has moved to a new url. i’ve linked to it below.

Read

Comments [16]

Reader Comments

Wow this is a great tut for the beginner/rat shack junkie thanks. Im starting on it tomarrow

Posted at 5:58 am on Jan 22nd, 2005 by hbarbobot

pretty nifty.
Unfortunatly I haven’t been able to get good range with any of the cheap (real cheap) models I have around the house already. good food for thought, I can prolly think of a few uses for the little buggers now that my brain is turning on it.

Posted at 4:17 pm on Jan 22nd, 2005 by Greg

“Unfortunatly I haven’t been able to get good range with any of the cheap (real cheap) models I have around the house already.”

I thought this at first as well, but he has a LOT of information in the article on improving the range.

Very well written article by a well informed person. However the article is quite old.

Posted at 8:55 pm on Jan 22nd, 2005 by thomas

here is how to make a cheap wing without buying the airplane kit. Someone could surly hack the r/c car only and turn it into one of these things.

http://www.webx.dk/rc/depron.htm

Posted at 10:16 pm on Jan 22nd, 2005 by Brandon

How weird, I found the same page yesterday. Looks like fun, I can’t wait to go harvest the local toy shops and build a few things with these. I have some BitChar-G cars that I picked up in Japan a few years ago ( months before they broke big time here) and have had gobs of fun with them. I like the idea of a proportional control hack vis microcontroler. Very clever.

Posted at 11:09 pm on Jan 22nd, 2005 by John

thanks that depron wing thing is pretty neat… Maybe I can substitute depron with duct tape… I wonder if I can build something that’ll fly from duct tape? hmm…

Posted at 11:27 pm on Jan 22nd, 2005 by Greg

yo, i can see it now, the ‘leet hacker/commando/terrorist of the future, scrapping open a box of last-almost-forgotten-empire-of-man-taiwan-special toy-store pallets, crates and crates of little bugs falling out of their by-then fully degraded-to-dust-on-disturbance plastic bubble-packs, rigging them up to self-made isotopic-degenerating power sources with the heads, ripped off a daily harvest from a hip-side protein-pack grasshopper-bottle colony, lassoed to the primitive logic chip of ‘last-era-man car-toy’, cast off into a distant red dawn wind, assembled out of the ruins of earth, fighting era-long nano-harvesting battles with neighboring techno-fascist tribes, somewhere over the horizon ..

or, i could just be all “pfftt, whatever!”, let the chinese do my ‘DIY’ for me, and buy a $5 RC glider, instead of a $5 ‘min-RC’ and some balsa, yo ..

Posted at 3:16 pm on Jan 23rd, 2005 by torpor

OOPS!
“Bandwidth Limit Exceeded”

Posted at 8:48 am on Jan 24th, 2005 by foxops

This hack could be quite dangerous. Those RC remotes are fairly unreliable and occupy a very congested frequency band. Someone with an RC car could come along and end up controlling your plane crashing it for you.

Posted at 9:26 pm on Jan 24th, 2005 by Robert

Bandwidth exceeded. NOOOOOOOO!

Posted at 5:04 pm on Jan 26th, 2005 by Thrill

Darn. Does anyone have a copy of the instructions for this project?

Posted at 10:41 am on Jan 27th, 2005 by RGB

shutdown site , dead link

Posted at 11:47 am on Jan 27th, 2005 by Peter

the page was moved to a new url. i’ve updated the link. check it out and get hacking!

Posted at 1:38 pm on Jan 27th, 2005 by jason striegel

Duct tape around a ethernet copper wire frame, with the instructions for something like the devron mod would be l33t….

Posted at 4:36 pm on Jan 27th, 2005 by CDE

“any length of aerial antenna” wont work as well as the right length. Theres a perfect dipole antenna length for every frequency. Search the net for “antenna calculator” to find the best length for your antenna. Also include “ham” or “amateur” “radio” in your search (it might help you find it). Also, if you transmit under .5 watts, I think its legal with the fcc. –.5 watts doesnt go too far. maybe a mile or so tops. Plus, your radio controlers dont identify themselves, thus it would be hard for them to catch you. But check on the FCC’s website to be SURE your legally transmittng. good luck!!! Dont transmit illegally because of me! oh yah, you can search the internet for antenna designs that will effectively increase your transmit power but still keep it down so its legal…. just a thought.

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