THP Entry: The Everything RC Transmitter

OSRC With few exceptions, most of The Hackaday Prize are things we really haven’t seen much of before: base-3 computers that have been relegated to the history books, extremely odd 3D printers, and fancy, new IoT devices are the norm. The OSRC is not a new project to us. (UPDATE: Looks like they deleted their project page. Here is a snapshot of it from the Internet Archive) We saw it once in 2011 and again a year later. What makes the OSRC an interesting project for The Hackaday Prize isn’t the fact that it’s the most advanced RC transmitter ever created. Creating that was evidently the easy part. The OSRC could use a big financial kick in the pants, and if [Demetris] wins, we’d guess he wouldn’t be taking that ride to space. Rather, he’d be taking the cash prize to get his ultimate transmitter into large-scale manufacturing and out into the wild.

While at first glance the base model OSRC seems expensive at about $6-700 USD, consider this: a six-channel transmitter from an excellent brand costs about $120 USD. Nine channels will run you about $400. The OSRC is a forty channel radio. The sticks are capable of force feedback, and of course the ‘pro’ model of the OSRC has that wonderful screen, capable of displaying video from an FPV camera, a GPS/map overlay, or an incredibly extensive telemetry display. There are multi-thousand dollar avionics for real airplanes out there that have a smaller feature set, and that’s not hyperbole.

A few months ago, [Demetris] was interviewed by the awesome people at Flite Test. That (highly suggested) video is embedded below.


SpaceWrencherThe project featured in this post is an entry in The Hackaday Prize. Build something awesome and win a trip to space or hundreds of other prizes.

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Repairing A Damaged RC Rx Due To Reverse Polarity Power Input

Rx Receiver Repair

Once in a while all of us technocenti get a little complacent and do something that may be considered ‘dumb’ while working on a project…. like cutting the wrong side of a piece of wood or welding a bracket on in the wrong direction. [Santhosh] is human like everyone else and plugged in the power connector to his RC Receiver incorrectly, rendering the receiver useless. How will his Arduino-controlled Robot work without a functioning receiver?

[Santhosh] started by opening up the case to expose the circuit board and checking out the components inside. The first component in the power input path was a voltage regulator. Five volts DC was applied to the input side of the 3.3-volt regulator but only 1.21 came out the other end. Now that the problem was quickly identified the next step was to replace the faulty regulator. Purchasing an exact replacement would have been easy but cost both time and money. [Santhosh]’s parts bin contained a similar regulator, a little larger than the original but the pinout was the same.

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Renesas RX Design Contest: $110K+ Of Cash And Prizes

It seems that we have caught Design Contest Fever here at Hackaday. After covering some other design contests, and asking readers to send in more, we heard from a couple tippers about Renesas’ challenge. Like many of the other contests, entrants can submit their ideas, and possibly receive a free development board to get them started. Unlike the other contests though, Renesas board (possibly) free development board is everything but the kitchen sink. Designed with RTOS’s in mind, rather than the normal microcontroller tasks, this board has an astounding number of capabilities.

On top of the excellent development kit, the contest is also offering books, software, and cash prizes to the winners. So get out there, design something amazing, and make Hackaday proud.

A History Of SparkFun Prototypes

sparkfuntoys

If you haven’t checked out SparkFun Electronics’ prototype collection yet, you’re missing out. They unearthed many of their old prototypes and published them to show what kind of mistakes could be made. You’ll see plenty of errors and get hints on what to look for while developing your own hardware. This pairs well with their Design for Manufacture post. Along with the pile of broken board iterations, they also walk through how the company developed. Finally, they specifically cover the individual iterations of the BlueSMiRF.

One of the interesting modules in the gallery that never saw full release was the SparkFun Toys line pictured above. The individual units used the standoffs as the power and data bus. The four posts were arranged so they could only be connected in one orientation: power, ground, TX, and RX. It’s an interesting idea that seems like it might be worth exploring further. SparkFun says that it worked fine, but didn’t feel they had the resources to market it to the intended audience.