Hamster bought a cheap Infrared toy helicopter with the intention of hacking the protocol and he successfully built an FPGA interface for it.
He started with Capturing the commands using a IR receiver module but the IR sensor he had didn’t give any useful signal so he decided to open the transmitter and inspect it.
“So I opened the transmitter and inspected it. The output is a chain of three LR LEDs, a resister and an NPN surface mount transistor driven by an unlabelled 14 pin DIP IC. The negative/ground trace on the PCB is to the centre pin on the left (pin 11) and the transistor is driven by the top right (pin 8).”
He checked up the voltage levels and then he hooked up his OpenBench Logic Sniffer and captured a few frames.
Hamster wrote an excellent article to describe his project with all the datasheets and full source code in VHDL check it out for an in-depth look at what went in to the project.
He also wants to improve his project, at the moment he only hooked the throttle up to the switches and he should hook the push-buttons to the left/right front/back so he could fly the helicopter!
Feel free to discuss this nice project in the comments thread.
Click here for the article, enjoy!
(via hamsterworks, original article by Hamster)
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