remote control

247 Articles

For The Trade Show Booth That Has Everything, A Blimp!

November 29, 2011 by 9 Comments

Trade shows are all about attracting attention and getting people to learn about your product, so what could be better than a custom-built RC blimp? Sure, you could just buy one, but what’s the fun in that? After several design iterations, [Tretton37] came up with a blimp known as the [LeetZeppelin] controlled by an Arduino, an XBee module, as well as a Wiimote controller connected to a computer.

The hack itself is a great example of repurposing off-the-shelf materials into something more interesting and unique. In addition to the components listed above, hobby servos were modded to allow for thrust motor control in conjunction with Legos for the gearing and “pillow-block bearings.” A list of the “important” parts used in this hack is furnished on their site as well as a video of it in action, which is also after the break.

As for the results of this hack as a trade-show attention grabber, Fredrik Leijon had this to say: “We think that all the gazing at the sky and half opened mouths proves that it was a huge success!”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geMrAmBJsls&w=470&h=315%5D

Hackaday Links: November 24, 2011

November 24, 2011 by 9 Comments

Finally an Arduino shield that does nothing

The folks at Evil Mad Scientist labs have finally created the Googly Eye Shield for Arduinos. With it’s pass-through .100 headers, it adds googly eyes to your Arduino projects. Of course, instead of in addition to the googly eyes you could add a breadboard, making it somewhat useful. A million fake internet points goes to the first person to implement Xeyes on this thing.

Phat beats from kids toys

[Ville] couldn’t afford an Akai MPC for laying down some beats. Wanting a real tactile interface, he hacked this kid’s toy. It’s just an RCA cable attached to the tiny chip inside the toy. The new line out goes to his mixers where he does some pretty impressive stuff.

Mona Lisa is Vigo the Carpathian

What did we just say about real-life Xeyes? [Geert] just made a print of the Mona Lisa follow you around the room with her eyes (Dutch, translation). The build is a pair of servos and a DIY motion capture app running on a laptop. Now we need to find a print of Vigo…

Quantifying heat sink efficiencies

[Mike] is an experimenter at heart. He was wondering about the efficiency of small, clip-on heat sinks versus the ones we use to defrost frozen food. The results are exactly as you would expect, but he did find something interesting – his experimental technique didn’t find much of a difference between thermal paste/grease/pads and no thermally conductive material.

Mini-fig sized R/C LEGO car

The guys at Brickmodder.net took a car from a LEGO set and made it remote control. The drive train and steering both use servos controlled by the smallest 3-channel receiver they could find.

A Very Simple Android Recon Vehicle

October 21, 2011 by 13 Comments

Desperately in need of a graduation paper, [Andrei] decided to build a few computer controlled recon vehicles (PDF warning), and we’re really impressed with the minimalist approach [Andrei] took.

The Computer Operated Recon Entity (C.O.R.E.) mk. I is based around a laptop. Instead of an Arduino, [Andrei] used a car stereo amp to control the motors. The two channel amp [Andrei] picked out has four outputs. Tying a motor to each output gives a four-wheel drive robot that’s really clever in its simplicity. With an onboard webcam, [Andrei] can do live video streaming from his remote vehicle. Outputting a specific tone with the sound card allows for full control of the robot.

The C.O.R.E. mk. II uses a Samsung Galaxy I5500 phone – the cheapest Android phone [Andrei] could find. The setup is similar to the mk. I C.O.R.E. with a WiFi connection sending video back to a base station. Control of the two motors is still handled by playing sound files and sending that to a stereo amp connected to the motors.

Check out the C.O.R.E. mk. II going Bach and forth after the break.

Continue reading “A Very Simple Android Recon Vehicle” →

Prototyping A Bluetooth To IR Remote Control Translator

September 29, 2011 by 14 Comments

[James] is one of those guys on a quest to control everything with one device. His tool of choice is an Android phone, which can do quite a lot right out of the box. But he was never satisfied with its lack of IR remote control abilities. He fixed that feature-gap by building a Bluetooth to Infrared translator.

The hardware he used for the prototype is quite simple. A cheap serial Bluetooth modem from eBay lets him connect to his phone. An Arduino board listens for data from the modem and converts incoming commands to flashes on an IR LED. Voila, he can control the tube with his phone.

We love the potential of this hack. The Bluetooth module runs from 3.3V, and reading serial data and flashing an LED is extremely simple. You should be able to use a small uC, say an ATtiny13, and a 3.3V regulator to miniaturize the module. We could see this plugging into the USB port on the back of a TV for power, with a wire extension to put the LED into position. The only shortfall is the inability to turn the TV on remotely when drawing power this way.

Remote codes aren’t particularly large to store either. So this would be pretty easy to extend to full control of all IR-compatible home entertainment devices. You just need a tool to discover the remote control codes.

Continue reading “Prototyping A Bluetooth To IR Remote Control Translator” →

How To Decode IR Remote Control Signals With Your PICkit 2

September 26, 2011 by 14 Comments

[SpiralBrain] needed to figure out the coding scheme used by an IR remote control so that he could use it with his own project. He built an IR receiver board for the PICkit 2 and figured out how to use some of the Microchip software to measure the timing of the incoming signal.

The hardware’s dead simple; a 38 kHz IR receiver does the heavy lifting by filtering out errant infrared light. When it does detect a signal with the correct frequency the output pin drives the base of a transistor to toggle the input pin on the PICkit 2. The breakout board has a pin header which makes it a snap to detach and store for later use. The PICkit 2 Logic Tool software captures this input, by setting the correct pin as a trigger and choosing a 10 kHz sample rate.

As we discussed in our PIC programming with Linux tutorial, the PICkit 2 really is far superior to its replacement, the PICkit 3. [SpiralBrain] mentions that it is more versatile than the newer version but doesn’t go so far as to tell us whether you can use this hardware with the PICkit 3 or not.

ATtiny Hacks: Infrared Guidance And Navigation

September 23, 2011 by 3 Comments

After [trandi] got his hands on a cheap R/C helicopter he realized the difficulties in actually flying a remote control helicopter. Instead of giving up, he decided to reverse-engineer the infrared protocol and then build a decoder around an ATtiny that would send commands to another microcontroller using a serial connection.

The remote’s communications protocol was decoded with the help of a Freeduino and an IR remote analysis sketch [trandi] found on the Arduino website. After importing the data into Gnuplot, there was enough data to write a sketch in Processing to visualize the infrared pulses.

After figuring out the protocol of his remote control, [trandi] built a tiny circuit to decrypt the IR commands and send them over a serial link to another microcontroller. The ATtiny45-based build doesn’t take up very much space on the perfboard making it very easy to mount on any robot of his choosing. He ended up connecting it to a Lego NTX brick allowing him to use the helicopter remote with any Lego build he can dream up.

[trandi] invested a lot of work around a cheap remote control; if the remote broke, all would be for naught. This was remedied with an IR beacon that replicates the function of the remote. The beacon is based on an ATtiny13 and can serve as a stand-alone beacon for autonomous robots or can accept serial commands from a computer. Not a bad build if you ask us.

Motorized Blinds Put Control At Your Fingertips

September 19, 2011 by 13 Comments

remote_controlled_motorized_blinds

While [Bremster] likes the view from his office window, he often needs to get up and adjust the blinds several times throughout the day in order to keep the glare from killing his eyes. Like any other enterprising hacker, he decided that constantly adjusting them was too repetitive, and that he could automate the process with electronics.

He thought that RC car servos would be a great choice to control the blinds, since they are cheap and the geared drive system offers a lot of torque at low speeds. After modifying the servos to enable continuous rotation, he set off to the hardware store in search of a way to mount them to the blinds’ looped cords.

After mounting some nylon spacers with rubber grommets on the servo arms, he installed them into a set of brackets he built and gave the blinds a spin. Now, he can easily control his blinds from the comfort of his desk with the simple flick of a switch – that’s the kind of laziness ingenuity we can respect!

Continue reading to see a quick video of his motorized blinds in action.

Continue reading “Motorized Blinds Put Control At Your Fingertips” →