Connecting my RC transmitter to the CF client

Firmware/software/electronics/mechanics
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gmcintire
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Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Nov 22, 2013 9:51 pm

Connecting my RC transmitter to the CF client

Post by gmcintire »

I found a way to do this. FWIW here is what I did to use my transmitter and radio to control CF.

1. Used the VM client on my laptop
2. Used my Turnigy 9x but am using a FrSky transmit module(RF 9x V2) and FrSky receiver(D4R-II) which can output Combined PPM
3. Made a cable to feed the receiver CPPM into the line-in input of my laptop
4. Enabled audio to the VM
5. Had to play with alsamixer in order to enable the line-in in the VM
6. Installed TXPPM http://txppm.4dstabi.com/

Now, with this I could get some signals to come to the CF client, but I could not calibrate, so I made my own json in the CF client config/input directory and played with the channel IDs and scale until I got it working.

Above may work for you, but I was having some dropouts. I recompiled the TXPPM code and found that it was decoding the CPPM stream incorrectly sometimes and getting wild values. I'm not sure why. Latency between the host and guest or something else, but I put in a kludgey fix which works for me. If get_data returned anything but 8 channels(my setup), ignore that reading. This allowed it to work pretty well for me.

A lot of work, but now I can use my transmitter and receiver and am not tied to the laptop.

An alternative to using a receiver capable of CPPM is to just plug the transmitter "buddy cord"(trainer cord) into the line-in port with an 1/8" male to male cable but of course you will be tied to your computer. Still it saves having to buy an Xbox or Playstation just to use CF.
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