Radio Controlled communication

[Dhruv Patel]

My friends and I are designing a paintball sentry gun which we plan to build very soon. For this project, I'm in charge of the electronics portion, so I wanted general advice on the best way to do this. The sentry will have two ranges of motion. One 360 degree pan using a 6 rpm geared motor, and the a tilt mechanism using 2 servos on each side of the gun. I want to create a manual remote control with a range of at least 100 meters (we're also going to attach a wireless camera feed later)

It seems to me that I have 2 options, but I'm unsure which is the best and how exactly to do what I want. (Sorry, I'm fairly new to electronics)

Option 1: Use two microcontrollers (arduinos) with XBee communication and create my own controller. My problem with this is that I want to work with the lowest budget I can, and the XBees seem pretty difficult to program and wire. (I currently have very little knowledge of XBees other than what they do). Overall it just seems like this method would overcomplicate things for no reason.

Option 2: Use a pre-made transmitter/reciver pair. The problem I'm having with this is that I can't find any transmitter with the layout i need (at least 3 channel with a pushbutton for shooting). I may be able to modify 4-channel transmitter by replacing on of the levers with a pushbutton, but I don't want to buy one and try before consulting with people that know more about it than I do.

Any ideas or advice? Thanks

 

[KrisBlueNZ]

I don't know whether this will help at all, but it's possible to buy pretty cheap video repeater units that transmit video in one direction and infra-red remote control commands in the other direction.

These are intended for use in houses where you have a single digital TV or satellite decoder but you want to be able to watch the video on another screen somewhere else, and to control the decoder box from that remote viewing location as well.

If you could find something suitable with sufficient range, this might be a cheap option. You would need a motorised device to control the camera, with infra-red control. I don't know if these exist, but there is probably a market niche for them, so they might do.