Manual Control with an RC transmitter

I just discovered something on the internet that I’m very excited about.

Brian Corteil in his post on manual control said that while you could use an RC transmitter to control your robot, but there was no simple solution to connect the signal into your Raspberry Pi.

Well – I’ve just found one 🙂

It seems that Spectrum DSM2/DSMX Satellite receivers connect to their master unit using a 3-pin cable. This cable carries 3V3, GND and a SERIAL link. This can connect directly into the Raspberry Pi UART – set the baud rate to 115200bps (which I think is the default anyway).

The first 2 bytes in each frame are sync bytes (0x03, 0x01), then there are 7 pairs of bytes which tell you the position of each of the transmitter channels (joystick axes).  Just read the bytes and make your robot dance! 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *