In the Hackers group this week, we took a large step forward in our Project SABRE (Small Autonomous Battling Robotic Entities), when we started working with remote controllers for our robots.

Components

From what the group has read, it looks like the most widely-used controllers are Spektrum-compatible DSMX or DSM2 ones. Therefore, we bought 3x Lemon RX DSMX/DSM2 receivers and one MLP4DSM Blade transmitter (as shown in the photo).

• Receivers: https://www.ebay.com/itm/252708297055
• Transmitter: https://www.ebay.com/itm/232565387228

Connecting to the Arduino

Pins on the receiver are simply connected to digital pins on the Arduino.

To program the Arduino to read the receiver, this code has been cross-referenced from other forums: https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/348

According to the comments, while this works, you should use interrupt-driven code.

This StackExchange post has a good list of possible references:

https://robotics.stackexchange.com/questions/1207/read-multiple-channels-of-rx-tx-with-arduino

There was a lot of excitement when people were able move the joystick on the transmitter and have it change the value being printed out in the Arduino console!