DAN139

RC Receiver Interface

  By Michael Simpson

Have you ever wanted to connect your RC Radio to a microcontroller?  Well with the Dios its so easy its down right ridiculous.

I have connected a 6 channel helicopter radio and 2 and 3 channel car radios with great success.  The receiver needs to be a BEC radio.  If not you will need a separate power source for the receivers.   I have used Futaba/Hitech and Tower Hobbies radios.   I cant get my expensive Airtronics M8 radio to work though.

Schematics

To connect to the receiver I took a header and cut it down to three pins.  This gives me the data pin and the voltage leads.  For all the other channels you can use just 1 lead connected to the data pin on each channel.

The program could not be simpler.   We use the pulsein command.  since we know the pulsein command returns the pulse width in .1us increments.   By dividing the count by 10 we get the true microsecond reading of the channel read.  We know that the receiver will output a pulse between 1ms and 2ms with 1.5ms being the middle.    We will get a reading between 1000 and 2000.   Its then up to your program to take this data act on it.

Program 1 Download it here

func main()

dim v1,v2,v3,v4

loop:
   pulsein 0,1,7000,v1
   pulsein 1,1,7000,v2
   print v1/10," ",v2/10
   goto loop


endfunc
 

Parts list

Dios 40 Pin Chip

Dios Carrier #4

 

Easy RS232 Driver  

Dios 28 Pin Chip

Dios 32 Pin Carrier (Carrier #1)

 

7.5V AC Adapter

9 Pin Cable

Breadboard and Wire Kit

Breadboard Regulator