In this talk I will present how I modified the remote control of a cheap 15$ quadcop in order to add a computer interface:
* First, I developed a small hardware board for signal tapping from and signal injection into the quadcop's remote control.
* Next, I connected an Arduino board and developed a small software written in the C programming language, that does real-time signal A/D conversion of incoming / outgoing flight control signals, time-stamping and low-level signal processing of incoming signal data, and buffering of incoming and outgoing signal data.
* Third, I connected a Raspberry Pi 3 board to the Arduino board and developed a Java Application that retrieves flight control signal data from the Arduino with the possibility to record it to a file. Also, the application allows for replaying recorded data back to the Arduino for signal injection into the quadcop's remote control.
* The next step would be to extend the Java application for either editing recorded flight control data or creating completely new flight control data from scratch.
Schematics and software are available as open source licensed under GNU GPL v3, see here:
https://github.com/soundpaint/QuadCopHack
For a detailed description, look here: https://github.com/soundpaint/QuadCopHack