Adding Shoulder Buttons To An RC Transmitter

radio

[Gerard] does puppeteering and animatronics work, and to remotely control his creations and characters he uses an off-the-shelf remote control radio. It’s you basic 6-channel setup, but [Gerard] wanted a way to control eye blinks and other simple actions with the press of a button. Sure, he could use the toggle switches on his transmitter, but he wanted something that wouldn’t require turning a servo on and off again. To fix this problem, [Gerard] added shoulder buttons to his transmitter with only a little bit of soldering.

[Gerard]’s transmitter uses toggle switches to send a signal on channels five and six. To add his push buttons, he simply drilled a hole in the plastic enclosure, installed a pair of push buttons, and wired them in parallel to the toggle switches.

Now [Gerard] has momentary switches on channels five and six, perfect for making his creations blink. Since the buttons are wired in parallel with the switches, flicking the switches to the ‘on’ position in effect takes the button out of the circuit, just in case the transmitter gets jostled around.

6 thoughts on “Adding Shoulder Buttons To An RC Transmitter

  1. Very simple and quick. However, he may wanto to explore an in-puppet microcontroller for automatic blinking, especially if he buys another radio or wants to sell this one in the future.

  2. I have the exact same radio system but instead of adding press button switches I want to replace the Ch6 (flaps) two position switch with a 3 position or variable dial switch to get more than one position of flaps. I have cheaper radios with these switches so I can salvage the parts from there, I am just interested in knowing if this can work?

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