The “picCAR” App turns an Android-Tablet or Smartphone with Bluetooth into an R/C transmitter.

The app is based on the Cxem Car 1 Open Source Projekt. The app has been extended and revised to interface with a PiKoder/SSC RX receiver.

The picCar app is open source and released under a GNU General Public License Version 3; the source code is provided through github.

User interface

The user interface of the picCAR app is pretty intuitive and straight forward. You can select one of four control modes by touching the respective screen button: button control, a virtual joystick, accelerometer (control by moving the device) and a combination between accelerometer and a slider. The Bluetooth connection would be established once the mode has been selected.

For building your receiver please refer to the PiKoder/SSC Bluetooth receiver page. The App is supported by all PiKoder/SSC firmware versions. It is recommended though that you use a PiKoder/SSC firmware 1.03 or above in order to deploy the TimeOut-Funktion of the Android app.

picCAR User’s Guide (.pdf File, EN)

The picCAR User’s Guide describes the picCAR app in detail.

The Ardupilot Mega (APM) and other flight controllers are frequently controlled by a PPM stream rather than the parallel input per channel which I described in part 1 of this blog. The new PiKoder/PPM wRX receiver with its PPM frame output brings this capability to you. The connection between the receiver and the flight controller is reduced to a single 3 strand cable as shown in the featured image.

Description

The PiKoder/PPM wRX receiver will be controlled by the udpRC4UGV App as described in part 2 of this blog.

The feature set of the app has been extended to allow you to freely determine the position of the direction and throttle channel within the PPM frame through the app preferences.

To change the channel setting please select the respective preference and enter the channel number (1 .. 8). E.g. the APM Rover configuration features direction on channel 1 and throttle on channel 3.

Please note that setting the APM’s input mode from parallel to PPM requires a jumper between channel 2 and channel 3 input as shown below.