https://www.instagram.com/p/CtiFmGGp7yf/
<aside> ⚠️ Disclaimer: I will not be sharing code or CAD models for this project at this time. While it’s been working well for me, I don’t believe the project is mature enough to be open-sourced. Aside from potential legal liabilities, I wouldn’t feel morally good if code that I wrote were to cause any property damage or injury to humans.
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For as long as I’ve been making things, I’ve been fascinated with how humans interact with machines. User interfaces, control panels, etc. I also get a kick out of getting things that shouldn’t be able to talk to each other, talk to each other.
I’ve worked on a lot of projects for FRC, a past life’s DJ hobby, and eventually combat robots that activate these two neurons. Here are a few:
Modified MIDI Keyboard to DJ Controller, circa 2012
DJ Controller 2015
“The BOX”, Operator control panel for FRC399 2023
xBox controller station for combat robots, 2021
That last project was a system that polls an xBox controller over USB for inputs to parse into a PPM trainer signal to talk to a COTS OpenTX radio. I used it at a few combat events with 3 different robots. It worked very well and was fun to work on, but it was ultimately too bulky to carry to most events and was ultimately shelved.
This was the precursor to Project: ROTOM.
Earlier this year, I had the itch to do another pass at a nontraditional controller setup for combat robots.
I knew I had a few hard requirements for the finished project:
<aside> 📶 Fully standalone - no cables or external equipment to operate
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<aside> 📦 Operate on standard RC protocols - I did not want to design an entire custom radio stack
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<aside> 🔌 Extensible - ability to reconfigure the setup for different types of robots
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<aside> 🦺 Safe and reliable - Since there is a true risk of property damage and bodily injury associated with combat robots, safety was paramount.
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It wasn’t a hard requirement, but I wanted to build something I know a lot of people have been waiting for - a pistol grip form factor radio running OpenTX.