Richard J. Prinz

Using a Raspberry PI as the brain for you next flying (e.g. plane or quadcopter) R/C project seems to be very interesting. Unfortunately weight is important. So I thought it would be a good idea to check the weight of the different models A and B and find ways how to make them even lighter.

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So you have a new quadcopter or transmitter from Walkera and found out that there is a new firmware available on the Walkera download site. Unfortunately you don’t have the UP02 and its companion UP02-Adaptor at hand but want to update regardless. In this blog post I’ll describe another way to update your device.

 
 
 
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Walkera has a lot of interesting Copters and also a lot of add on’s for them. The X-Z-18 is a simple camera module usable for example withe the Hoten-X quadcopter. Unfortunately there is nearly no or wrong documentation available on how to install and use it.

So this post shows how to install and use it. If you are interested on some internals of the X-Z-18 then have a look at this post.

The R/C transmitter used is a Walkera Devention DEVO-7.

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Based on this post which describes controlling a Flight Simulator software with your R/C transmitter the following post describes the other way round: controlling a R/C model from the PC using an Arduino UNO.

The R/C transmitter used in this project is a Walkera Devention DEVO-7.

There are two ways to control a R/C modell from the PC:

1. Using a standard R/C transmitter by using the trainer port most transmitters have (this should also work on older transmitter models). In this case the PC is responsible for providing a PPM signal which contains information’s about all transmitter channels. The PC can produce such a signal using it’s sound card or by using an Arduino connected to the PC via USB.
    

2. By using only the transmitter module which could be found especially in newer 2GHz transmitters. The transmitter module used by the Devo7 is a WK-21201RF which uses a Cypress CYRF6936 wireless USB chip. This module has just 8 pins using standard signals like MISO, MOSI, Reset, CS, VDD, GND (Pinout can be found on Google) and can be directly connected to the Arduino.

This solution uses the DSC trainer port of the Devo7 (so there is no need to open the Devo7) and an Arduino for creating the PPM signal.

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So you have just bought your new very fancy quadcopter? Fine! But I’m pretty sure (unless you are
very talented) after some flights somehow the idea will arise to have the oportunity to train your
flying skills without some (maybee more) hard landings or (worse) crashes.

Here I describe a way to connect nearly every R/C transmitter to your PC using an Arduino UNO
board. Why? Because I bought a quadcopter and hat some hard landings and crashes so I started
training on the PC using a flight simulator controlled by my R/C transmitter.
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