Thursday, March 25, 2021

Hacking a Toy RC Plane

I've posted before about my cousin, Mike Gardi, his projects to recreate educational computing toys from the 1960s. His brother, John Gardi, is equally talented and has been working on an interesting project of his own. He's been hacking a small remote-controlled (RC) plane to give it first-person video capability, so he can fly it while seeing the cockpit view from the plane. What really impresses me about this is that John is legally blind, and being in that category myself, I can really appreciate how hard this is. 

I recently got a new 3 channel, 65 gram RC plane that I'll convert to FPV. This build log will go through the steps on how to do that drawing on the lessons I learned modding that first plane last year.

I'll try to be as unobtrusive as possible with most of the mods I make to the plane being reversible or removable.

I think this could bring something new to the FPV realm. I decked out the cockpit to give me that visceral experience of being the pilot I so dreamed of becoming. I didn't want to fly like Superman with a clear field of view, I wanted to fly a plane from the pilot's seat!

There might even be some interesting possibilities here, like drone racing but flying these electric micro scale RC planes. Or maybe air combat with tuned lasers that shut down a plane's engines when detected.


As well as the site linked above, you can follow John's progress on Twitter


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