Category Archives: radio control

Foam Airboat is Cheap RC Fun

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Archer fans and residents of Louisiana will already be familiar with the concept of the airboat. Put a powerful engine running an aircraft prop on a flat-bottomed hull, and you’ve got an excellent way to traverse the marshes of the American South. While a fully-fledged airboat might run you the best part of $100,000, this no-frills radio-controlled version is great fun at a much lower price.

The hull is built on a sheet of foam, which is cheap, readily available, and suitably buoyant for the task. It’s then kitted out with a brushless motor to run the prop and a …read more

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Centurion Bridge Layer, Now In RC

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Radio controlled models are great fun. Most of us have had a few RC cars as children and maybe dabbled with the occasional helicopter or drone. It’s a rare breed of modeler, however, that gets to drive a radio-controlled bridge laying tank.

The model is a replica of the British Centurion Bridgelayer – a modified tank designed to allow mechanized units to readily cross rivers and similar obstacles in European battlefields. While the genuine article relied on hydraulics, the RC version takes a different tack. [hawkeye3guns] built custom linear actuators out of motors, gears, and brass to deploy the bridge. …read more

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RC Boat Goes Brushless For Speed & Reliability

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Remote control boats can be great fun, and come in all manner of forms. There are unpowered sailcraft, speedboats that scream under the power of internal combustion, and of course, those that move under electric power. The brushless motor revolution of the past 20 years in particular has proven capable of creating some exciting RC watercraft, and [Matt K] decided he wanted to get on board.

[Matt] had owned a Kyosho Jetstream 1000 for several years, but found the nitro engine to be temperamental and not the most fun for high-jinx down at the lake. An old-school brushed motor setup …read more

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Giant F1 Car Is 3D Printed and Radio Controlled

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The OpenRC F1 car is a radio control car you can 3D print and assemble yourself. You make the parts, glue them together, and then add your RC gear. That’s all well and good, but could it be done… bigger? [3D Printing Nerd] decided to tackle this one at 4x scale.

It goes without saying that this took some work. The model has to be carved up into sections that would actually fit on the printers to hand. This can take some planning to ensure the parts still come out nicely, as they may be printed in different orientations or …read more

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Screw Drive Tank is Radio Controlled, 3D Printed

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Screw drives are something that we don’t see a lot of – they’ve got an interesting set of attributes making them useful on soft ground, but woe betide you if your local transport department catches you trying to belt one of these up the freeway. After a long development period, [Ivan] has finally perfected his screw drive tank.

This is something that’s been in the works for a long time. It’s a primarily 3D-printed build, showing just how easy it is to build complex machines from scratch in this day and age of rapid prototyping. Over time, [Ivan] has experimented …read more

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How The Hero Droid BB-8 Rolls

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By now we’ve come to expect a bountiful harvest of licensed merchandise to follow every Star Wars film. This year’s crop included many flavors of BB-8 so every fan can find something to suit their taste. At the top of this food chain is a mobile interactive “Hero Droid BB-8”. For those who want to see how it works, [TheMikeSenna] cracked open his unit to feed our curiosity.

Also called “Spin Master BB-8” for the manufacturer, this toy is impressively sophisticated for its price point. The video surveyed the mechanical components inside the ball. Showing how the droid travels, and …read more

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3D Print Yourself A Flame Thrower

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For a large proportion of the world’s population, it’s now winter, which means there’s plenty of rain and snow to go around. With the surrounding environment generally cooler and wetter than usual, it’s a great time to experiment with dangerous flame based projects, like this wrist mounted flame thrower.

It’s a build that does things in both a simple and complicated way, all at once. Fuel is provided by a butane canister with a nozzle that needs to be pressed to release the gas.  A servo is used to push the canister into a 3D printed housing, releasing the gas …read more

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Lego Go-Kart Scores Radio Control

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LEGO has always been an excellent toy for both play and learning, and the Technic sets are a great starting point for any budding engineer. Not content to rest on their plastic, blocky laurels, LEGO introduced more advanced parts over the years, such as motors and battery packs to allow builders to propel their creations. Combine this mechanical philosophy with [Matt]’s Giant Lego Go-Kart and you have one heck of a project.

It all started months ago, when [Matt] built his original Giant Lego Go-Kart, a 5-times scaled up model of the original kit #1972-1. Achieved through the wonder of …read more

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3D Printed Tyres Let You Drive on Water

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[Jesus] apparently walked on water, without any tools at all. But when you’ve got a 3D printer handy, it makes sense to use it. [Simon] decided to use his to 3D print some tyres for his R/C car – with awesome results.

[Simon] started this project with a goal of driving on water. Initial experiments were promising – the first design of paddle tyres gave great traction in the sand and were capable of climbing some impressive slopes. However, once aimed at the water, the car quickly sank below the surface.

Returning to the drawing board armed with the advice …read more

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Attack Some Wireless Devices With A Raspberry Pi And An RTL-SDR

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If you own one of the ubiquitous RTL-SDR software defined radio receivers derived from a USB digital TV receiver, one of the first things you may have done with it was to snoop on wide frequency bands using the waterfall view present in most SDR software. Since the VHF and UHF bands the RTL covers are sometimes a little devoid of signals, chances are you homed in upon one of the ISM bands as used by plenty of inexpensive wireless devices for all sorts of mundane control tasks. Unless you reside in the depths of the wilderness, ISM band sniffing …read more

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