[Tiny-tux] TinyTux will resume June 11th

[Corey McGuire]

Sorry for the lag.  Life is taking it's sweet time...

BUT!  I have a fun project I am going to do and it should be a simple, but
effective test, of embedded Linux.

We're going to get any one of the platforms at our disposal and then
interface it with a standard Hobby/Sport grade Radio Control.

I posted the following over the weekend on the noisebridge list, and it
spells out what I wish to do.  I have a receiver and its satellite on
order.  I already have the corresponding transmitter.  We'll try coding the
whole damn thing in python to pump out the raw values of the channels in
text.

We might just ride the coattails of the success of python on chumby, but I'd
like to do this under Debian/ARM if at all possible.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Corey McGuire <coreyfro at coreyfro.com>
Date: Tue, May 31, 2011 at 2:15 AM
Subject: Useful Robot Receiver that speaks Spektrum DSM2
To: NoiseBridge Discuss <Noisebridge-discuss at lists.noisebridge.net>, Orb
Swarm <swarm at lee.org>


New product from hobby king.
http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=13418

The concept of a "Satellite receiver" (meaning secondary receiver to feed
data to the primary receiver) is not new.  They are used in the quite likely
event that your RC aircraft is flipping around and it's main antenna's
polarity no longer matches your transmitter's, thus making your effective
range drop sharply in an instant.  Add a "Satellite receiver" oriented on
another axis/plane and this problem is lessened.

Unlike primary receivers, these satellite receivers do not drive servos or
speak PWM.  Instead of 2 to 10 PWM streams as output, they have one PPM
stream that contains all the information of all the channels on one data
line.

This means, if you want to control a robot using a pro/hobby grade wireless
protocol, instead of trying to capture up to 10 different PWM signals
simultaneously, you only need to capture one PPM signal.

PPM is standard.  All radios output it through their Trainer/DSC ports.
There are dozens of Arduino projects that speak PPM.  Now that we have a
cheap wireless way to deliver PPM, we can start controlling just about any
micro-controller with time tested, proven, low latency, highly redundant,
highly interference resistant, totally brainless, off-the-shelf 2.4GHz hobby
transmitters.

In other words, Radio Controlled robots just got a whole lot easier,
cheaper, and more reliable.
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