I am creating an RC blimp, and I only have 3 motors to control on the blimp. I was thinking about using an XBee, but it seems overboard and a bit of an expensive solution.
Does anyone know of a cheaper/smaller transmitter/receiver I only need like 100 ft of range.
You should get that sort of range with the MiRF V2, given that the thing is up in the air. You could use a high-gain antenna on the ground, to make sure.
I’ve used the PIC16F88 (18-pin), and the 18F4520 (44QFP). There is plenty of source code around, I’ve got some test software you can have (assembler and C) and you will find Brennen’s offerings on this forum. I’ve also got some PCB designs.
What specific things do you want to do with the blimp? In particular, motor control - speed or just off/on? What kind of a controller - handheld or a PC or ?
If you want more sophisticated control (like throttle), I’d use a microcontroller. The 16F88 would work well on either end. You’ll also need to manage motors but that’s fairly simple.
Basically the encoder encodes the button presses into a signal that can be transmitted. The decoder, well, decodes the signal from the receiver into “contact closures”. You can use these to turn on/off transistors that control the motors. There’s an 8 button remote that integrates the encoder and transmitter into one on that site - that would make for a pretty nice package.
These would allow you to put something together with no need for programming microcontrollers. pretty easy.
sure. it’s more work but pretty straight forward. you need to create a set of codes, one for each command you want to send. On the transmit side you send the codes. On the receive side you look for the codes and when you get one, do what ever it is the code is for. You might get away with using serial I/O. You’ll need to try to make the transmission “balanced” - 50% duty cycle. There are a number of forum threads that discuss this in great depth.
Hi i’m trying to make also an r/c with pic and xbee. I made the boards for tx and rx. I’m usign 18f4550. Baudrate 115200.
I’m having some trouble with xbee lag. For test i place on rx board a led, pic will turn on if receive on usart ‘1’ and turn the led off if receives anything else. If i send from pc, for example, via ftdi to rx board (pic+xbee) ‘1’ and ‘2’ alternative the led works ok, but some times prety often i got lag,some huge lag sometimes like 1-2 seconds. how can i solve this? I tryed with 9600 baudrate also, nothing better. I tryed pachetization timeout values: 0, 3, 10, 11 same rezult. is there anyway that i cand escape from lag?
I try this one too:
from tx board (pic+xbee) i send to xbee from 0 to 9 once at one second.
on pc (connected to other xbee via ftdi) i got 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and after that a pause of 1 second followed by a lots of 0-9 bytes. i have a video too.