I recently dug up my old RC transmitter and receiver and thought “How can i control my arduino with this?” so i powered on my scope to see what was going on at the receiver. Sure enough, it was sending out the standard PWM signal that servos use. Now I just needed something to control. What’s easy and fun to control? LED’s of course.
Step 1: The Receiver
To begin with i had to figure out what pin on the receiver was the signal pin for the servo. I found an extension cable, there i could clearly see what pin it was.
Step 2: Connecting it all
Now that i knew what pins were what i connected them to the arduino as follows:
I connected the signal to pin 8
and the led was connected to pin 11 because it has PWM capabilities.
I also connected the receiver ground to the arduinos ground and the 5v out from the receiver to the Vin on the arduino
Step 3: The Code
Now i started coding,
I used the pulseIn() function to read the pulses from the receiver and send them to the serial monitor, when i had those values i told the arduino to map those to the PWM values (0-255) and send them to the serial monitor again.
Now when i moved the joystick on the remote i saw the values change.
Now the last part of the code sends those PWM values to the led and fades it accordingly.
I was happy when i got this working but i needed a bit more challenge, i wanted it to control an RGB LED.
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RGB LED
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For more detail: Using FM RC Controllers using an Arduino
