Hi fellow roboteers,
I am building a video enabled robot with a zoom feature using a Camcorder mounted to a Pan tilt servo assembly.(see www.inspectorbots.com) I am using a 2 stick Spektrum DX6i , (a 6 channel, 2.4 Ghz DSM radio). However I only have 4 Proportional Channels. and they are all used up for the speed, steering, pan and tilt. Can anyone tell me how to get 5 or 6 Proportional Channels from A Spektrum DX6i or Futaba 2.4 Ghz 7 channel radio?
I’m thinking I could just throw a switch on the radio and the throttle stick turns into the camera zoom stick…??? anyone???
Thanks
Chris
I think others have also been tryng to suck the goodie out of RC transmitter/receiver units. You might want o look at what you can do with a single servo for non critical functions. Below I used a servo to operate a two sided six position switch from Radio Shack. This was to switch between 6 different video/audio sources. The same setup could probably be used to foward/reverse three small motors (servos modified to be gear head motors), or control relays to operate very large motors. On the tx end, you could disconnect a lead on one of the joysick pots and make a switch/button matrix controlling a resistor bridge to discretely position the single servo where it is needed. I think an interesting approach might be to hijack the tx input and rx output to essentially make an rs232 type of radio modem, but that probably would be another topic.
Twilight,
I currently have the Futaba T7C transmitter and for robotics it’s quite neat!
there are 4 channels , sticks on left and right side and a whole slew of buttons and knobs and 3 other mappable channels/buttons
there are switches A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H
Channel 5 is – With the setup I have now Switch E is a 3 state switch when a servo is connected to this you get full left, full right or center.
Channel 6 is a VR pot, will do the full sweep of a servos motion, I suspect you could use this for zoom.
Channel 7 is —Switch H is a toggle switch its either always full left or full right servo, when you press the switch it goes opposite of this
The rest of the switches are un-used and are used for rc planes or heli’s and generally you can set these switches for mixing increasing a servos range when a switch meets a certain criteria… the manual for this remote is nuts
However the point being with RC with whatever setup you have you can toggle between modes and control multiple servos from only a limited set of inputs when you use some coding, as an example. you could use the same control stick to control the camera panning left or right and then switch a button and the camera would stay in that position and that same stick would control the steering.
I believe there is only 1 other person besides me on this forum who has a T7C remote and that person is Zenta, He had convinced me to buy this transmitter and the thing is fantastic!
Feel free to pm me or post back here if you have any questions I’d be glad to assist you.
–Aaron
LikWid Chz
I have that Futaba T7C radio too. I guess that make 3 of us now- but that doesn’t mean I know how to use it…
I like the idea of using the VR Pot on Channel 6. for the Zoom. I’ll give that a try.
Thanks,
Chris
heh…
Well honestly one thing Ive found that helps is if you setup the t7c receiver on a bench connect a bunch of servos label the channels and start reading the manual.
I would like to attempt to get more switchable modes out of this setup I have but am unsure if it is possible… although not giving up!
I’m hoping there will be a way to use a switch that’s already there to like lets say extend the servos range + 100% and then have some bit of code that see’s that added range and actives some other operation specs , I’m pretty sure I can make this happen, I just need to sit down and read the manual, so far this thing is fantastic! Zenta modified his transmitter and I believe he eliminates 1 channel and converts it into a whole bunch of switches so each switch is a hard set position on a servo output so you can reference that in code… cool although I might want a heli in the future so I cant do that.
I took a look at your RC car dealie you made pretty slick, with this setup… you could like feed the other 3 channels into a botboard with atom pro, along with ssc32 or possibly no ssc32, and have the botboard switch outputs based on if conditions are being met and then control that specific servo.
anywho Yeah I don’t know how to use my T7C either so that makes 2 of us…, drop me a line if you find anything interesting with this, btw I have the Heli version.