How to use an iPhone to Fly R/C Airplanes and Helicopters | Hacker News Reader

How to use an iPhone to Fly R/C Airplanes and Helicopters

myauntishot.com

3 pointsjsatok5 comments

Finally, you may ask how the servos are being driven. Well, routers are used to send bits of information down a series of twisted pair wires usually. Guess what it takes to send packeted information? An IC that would work really well as a PWM! I did some haxoring around on this, and read what other nerds had done on the internet, and the next think you know I have a servo with a Cat5E plug on the end of it.

I'd love a lot more detail about this "then a miracle occurred" stage of the build. Drive a servo with an ethernet port?! Anyone know how to do this? That sounds crazy cool.

http://www.industrialtechnology.co.uk/index.php?pageId=47...

Yeah, I found that too. That just seems to be factory servos (big ones) with ethernet built in. The article suggests that there is somehow a way to reprogram the PHYS ics in the linksys to output PWM to drive the servos that were already in his rc copter.

I'd be really curious how this is possible since I use spakrfun serial servo controllers now that are expensive and require full serial ports to run that often aren't found on tiny openWRT-able routers.

Hmmm. Now that you mention it, I suppose it would not be difficult to format custom ethernet frames with a duty cycle proportional to an analog output.

Way Cool!

I did a hack a few years ago that made a PSX Dualshock pretend to be a buddy box. A PIC polled the joypad, then fed a PPM stream into a Multiplex 3030 xmtr. Having a centre-sprung throttle was neat - but other than that - it was not the best control experience ever.

From the eminent comfort of this armchair: If I was going to do this - I would have left the router on the ground and used a couple of XBee modules, with a micro (PIC, AVR) airborne to drive servos (4017 to spread 1 pwm pin to the servos)

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