Mod for FPV Diversity Controller (Arduino and Atmel chip)

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Mod for FPV Diversity Controller (Arduino and Atmel chip)

Postby rc-fan » Fri Jan 24, 2014 6:11 pm

Hi Bruce! Hi Guys!

I'm eagerly waiting for Bruce to publish his DIY diversity controller. Unfortunately just building Bruce's device will not be possible for me. The reason is that he uses a PIC micro controller for his project. I do not own a PIC progrmming device. But what I own is an Arduino and a bit of imagination...

As Bruce told in the comments of his video his project will be open source so I though why not create a modification/hack for Bruce's diversity controller to use a Atmel micro controller. I already started to write the Arduino software that is responsible for monitoring the RSSI inputs and switching to the video with the highest signal strength.


You might ask why I choose to use an Arduino for this project? Well besides been big and bulky the Arduino is great for prototyping. It's so easy to write a program, upload it and see it running. As I'm a professional software developer developing the software that does the switching is no problem for me. The Arduino ecosystem is very simply and user friendly. So everybody can use it. Uploading a program to an Arduino is nothing more than pushing a button with the provided Arduino IDE.

But besides the ease of use during the development the Arduino has a second cool feature that comes handy for this project. You can use an Arduino to directly upload the same program to an ATtiny chip. There is no need for a programmer or for rewriting the code. You simply connect your Arduino with a few cables to the ATtiny chip. And with the push of a button in the Arduino IDE the program will be uploaded to the ATtiny chip instead of the Arduino. After that the ATtiny is capable of running on it's own. No more need for the Arduino in the finished circuit! So the plan for my project is to use Bruce's circuit but replace the PIC with an Atmel ATtiny chip that will run my own diversity controller software.


If you want to follow me along I'll post my progress here: http://www.rcfan.info/fpv-diversity-controller/
All resources of my project (source code, diagrams, photos, ...) will be available here: http://bitbucket.org/rgruber/fpv-diversity/wiki/Home

Of course I'll also keep you posted here at this place ...
rc-fan
 
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Joined: Sun Jul 25, 2010 5:42 pm
Location: Austria

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