I start a new thread to let people know of that remote design.
I want to make a custom remote and give people the chance to have one too. Give me your comments and i can integrate them in the design.
For now i am planing to use:
Arduino Mega
Ginball from an old RC transmitter. (Don’t know if the dimensions are standard for others)(RobotDude said that he can sell ginball…) lynxmotion.net/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=7027
LiPo batteries and BEC
3 toggle switch
4 Potentiometer
2 slider (Only slot show cause i need more info on the part itself)
uOLED-128-G1 screen
4 pushbutton for the screen
XBee Trans
I have see somewhere on a thread this link to a custom cuting place.
They don’t do Aluminium so i would go to a Transparent Gray.
Very interesting! I liked V2 better. The case seem a bit to high especially if you plan to hold it while using it, unless you are planning to use some sort of neck-strap. Maybe placing the gimbals even higher would be better?
I will lower the topPlate and relocate de batterie and Arduino Mega. I have put the Gimbals a bit higher and remove potentiometer on top of it.
In your experience, does 4 round pot are too much ?
How did you made those cool potentiometer on top of the gimbals ? Is it homemade ?
Is the OLED a touchscreen? If not I personally find having the 16 key keypad very useful on our remotes. Things like selecting which gait I wish to run now, switch from waking to rotation mode…
I don’t think 4 pots are too much. It all depends how many AtoD inputs you got. One thing that I’ll try to do on my next DIY remote is to have as many switches/pots placed close to the gimbals so that its possible to used them while holding the gimbals, similar to how a RC plane/heli remote is designed.
Added:
Change in overall dimension
Potentiometer on Gimballs (Like Zenta) don’t know if i will be able to make those…
Change the location of push-button and switch to the top
Remove 2 round pot and change location of the other 2
change the height of the box
Added a 4x4 keypad
EDIT: Unless you’ve very large hands I think the gimbals should be placed even higher (closer to the top) so that you are able to reach the switches on the top side.
This is always a difficult type of question to answer. There are many different processors you could use here, all have pluses and minuses.
a) Use a Basic Atom Pro28 on a Atom Bot board. - Very capable, we already have source code for the current remote control that runs on it. However Zenta has already maxed out the number of IO lines (both analog and digital) and there is only one UART, so you have to be careful in your code to get multiple serial streams to work without glitches… Has a good LDO (low drop off) voltage regulator so handles low battery voltage well.
a2) Could use the arc32. A very nice board, With the HServo system you have about 17 analog pins available and enough digital pins for all of the other stuff… 2 UARTS, 1 taken by USB, 1 Free to use, probably for XBEE, and you still need to do bit bang for LCD. Alternative to find LCD that takes a different interface like I2C or SPI…
b) Arduino Mega: Lots of IO lines. You have 16 analog pins, so you can add tons of stuff. You have 4 UARTS, so you can use one for USB, 1 for XBee and 1 for display. So it should be easy to get it up and running without display issues or the like. The voltage regulators on the board are not as good as BB2, so may drop off sooner…
b2) Other At mega 1280 based systems like Axon or Axon2 (societyofrobots.com/axon2/) Like Arduino Mega, but has better power handling and 3 pin servo connectors…
c) Propeller - No Analog pins, so you would have to add external chips for this…
So in the end, I would say Yes Arduino mega would be a good choice. If I were to build a second one, I would strongly consider using one as I like programming in C/C++ and Arduino are a cost effective way to do this.
Yes the Axon2 is a very nice AVR Atmeta1280 controller, and if we were talking about which to use in a robot, and you wanted to plug in servos and sensors and the like, I would very much suggest it over an Arduino. Unless you can find a shield for the Arduino that has enough outputs and the like… But for the controller, you will be mostly doing simple wiring up to switches and the like and you are not really needing any power management. I believe you said that you were using a LIPO battery, so my guess is 7.2V, so if the recommended low voltage input is 6.5 but will work down to 6- than the non LDO of the voltage regulator should not be a problem. One of the other forum members who are better at electrical/electronics could talk about that than I could…
The first one you mentioned (dfrobot), looks like another Arduino Mega compatible board. It looks like it probably has the same form factor as the Arduino Mega which is a lot longer than tha standard Arduino. The Seeeduino version has the same form factor as the standard Arduino (smaller). The dfrobot version, probably uses the standard Arduino environment, which implies you can simply download stuff and use it.
The Maple controller you mentioned, looks like it has a Arduino compatible pin out, but it is a completely different processor, which may be great (up to 72mhz), but it has it’s own way IDE and bootloader… Which may be great, or… So if it works, great, but if you need help with something, you should check to see if there are any forums or the like that support this board…
Sorry that I am not good at giving black and white answers But if it were me, I would probably go with a Arduino type as it is the most populer…
I will wait for the XBee thing… Will make it work only with a serial cable at first… and then will add the wireless thing… (think it’s the best way to do it)
Looks good. Note, all of my stuff are based on series 1 XBees, which are not compatible. I don’t believe that it would be very difficult to modify the code to work with Series 2, but I have not done so…
