Drone racing is a extremely interesting sport, in which there is a great deal of space for hackers as well as makers to add that special sauce into the mix. usually the aerial surface line needs special race-timing hardware to do the lap counting, as well as there are timing entrance transponders offered for around $40. In his job CoreIR as well as CoreIR-Uplink, [Michael Rickert] decided to reverse engineer the IR Protocol that goes into these beacons as well as made a homebrew version that mimics the original. The transponders send a 7-digit number out repeatedly to a receiver at the surface line as the UAV passes by and that assists track exactly how quick drone pilots flew around a race track. The hack includes flipping an IR LED ON as well as OFF with the correct timing, as well as [Michael Rickert] confesses that it was not as simple as he had imagined.
Using a logic analyser he was able to catch the modulated 38Khz provider signal as well as extract the timing from the original beacon, however it took a number of iterations to get the code just right. The IRRemote library has a ‘sendRaw’ function which is rather practical in these circumstances as well as was employed for the task. He experimented with a number of Arduino boards to power the project, before lastly going with the Arduino pro Mini. He has shared the code on github, together with pictures of the completed hack which replaces the original circuit. The final sketches include functions to produce the 7-digit code to uniquely determine the quadcopter, which completes the hack in itself.
If that was not enough, he’s gone a step further by coding as well as sharing a desktop client as well, which turns this hack into a full-fledged job as well as should prove rather useful for drone racers on a budget. The app is written in NodeJS as well as packaged utilizing the electron framework, a option that makes for a extremely simple method to produce cross-platform desktop applications.
A develop tutorial is offered for you to get started, as well as if drone racing seems a bit tame, inspect out Drone Wars for a bit more carnage.