When I was akid we used to build small hovercrafts and race with them. Had we known that you could easily build one where you could drive yourself on we would have built it! The instructions are simple. Found this site too that has another design.
I’m quite interested in experimental photography and the interest has increased since I got my digital camera last year. One thing I really like is that it’s so easy to take images in dark situations. Though one problem is that I do not have a remote control for the camera so some images gets blurry due to motion. Canon does not have a remote control either so what to do? Build one yourself of course! It can not be that hard since you can take images with the camera from the computer once you have connected it, but I dont want to bring a PC every time. So I started looking on the net to see if someone else had done this already. I could not find any.
Though I found this document: Canon PowerShot Series Transfer Protocol Specifications Friday, August 8, 2003 which will most likely be really useful. The next problem is to find a really small and cheap CPU, like the PICs from MicroChip, nut that can be a USB host. Any tips are most welcome..
This project has just started….
Have bben working with a Plam application that read data from a device connected on the serial port. Had some problems with it. To see what actually was received I needed some tools and I found these;
RealTerm from SourceForge. Its specifically developed for debugging serial communication!
HCalc was also convinient to have when calculating CRCs.
The RealTerm people are working on another project I should check out when I got time. A PIC programmer, called PP06.
When I connected the FMS interface I built the other day to my new radio and the laptop I got a very jumpy signal. In the FMS Forum there where two different suggestions what might cause this, either to weak power in the serial port, or the reversed order of the signalcable from my Sanwa radio.
This guy had a similar problem but with another PIC interface, though for this one the source code is available. So maybe I will change mine to that one since the design was similar. Or just reprogram my PIC since I think the design is similar enough to do that, though I have to study it more carefully first.
Also the FMS Forum had a several posts on different hardware interfaces, maybe one can find a simple USB joystick based one there.
I just built the PIC 12C50x Serial Interface for FMS(see images below) and was about to program the PIC when I realized I was very unsure how the programmer worked and if I had the software as well to do it. So I though it could be good to write it now when I got it working.
The program to use is IC-Prog. Make sure the Hardware settings are set to Windows API if you use XP as I do. Also select the right com-port.
The IC to program should be placed with pin 1 furthest away from the RS232 connector(in my design that is!).
The design I used for my PIC programemr is from this site though I did not use their PCB layout but rather just used the schematics and built it on a proto-board.
Här är ett antal länkar till lite olika konstruktioner jag hittat för att koppla en radiokontroller tille n PC.
Enkel parallell ports kabel på For What Its Worth. Här finns en variant av denna kabel.
RC2PC(på franska) nyttjar Joystick porten istället.
Att koppla kontrollern genom USB porten verkar mest flexiblet men kräver lite mer avancerad konstruktion, se här.
