RF Is for Everyone

So if you’re anything like me, you find any project that integrates wireless anything to be quite daunting. Amazing — but scary. Ever since…

Becky Button
7 years ago

So if you’re anything like me, you find any project that integrates wireless anything to be quite daunting. Amazing — but scary. Ever since I started to make things with anything electrical (I’ve been making stuff for four years), I’ve always stuck with tethering things.

I’ve been fascinated with assistive tech for quite some time, with plans for manipulators that use Adafruit’s wireless board that didn’t need to be programmed. I couldn’t find one in my stash, but I did come across a 433 MHz wireless transmit and receive module, and decided that I would learn to use it in lieu of the other board. At first I did the obligatory “blink” type program. (You can find the tutorial for blink here)

After playing with the sample code, I was able to change the circuit a bit and make the code only transmit when the button was pressed. The receiver would then actuate the servo once it got signal.

I did all of my modeling in OpenSCAD, so that is would be easier when I inevitably messed up. After only three iterations I had a good model going.

Once I mounted everything to the wall, and reassembled the circuit, the RF setup wasn’t working too great. After playing with the threshold values some I was able to get it working well again.

Now that I see the power of wireless connectivity, I see that this sort of thing can be adapted for more kinds of scenarios, harnessing more kinds of boards. For my next project I’m definitely looking forward to working with an ESP8266-based WiFi board.

Want to see more? You can find all of the instructions here!

Becky Button
maker - hardware is my friend
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