2019-04-18, 03:22 PM
(2019-04-17, 07:17 PM)Saqqara Wrote: I don't like IR remotes, I'd love to get those little 4 button 433Mhz remotes working with Pypilot. I have that same relay board stuffed into my old AutoHelm controller. The remote hangs on a lanyard around my neck - it's a joy to be anywhere on the boat (say, on the foredeck with a flashlight) and adjust course. I don't even need to look at it.
Would Openplotter Actions be a useful way to bridge whatever buttons one might want to use to ask Pypilot to change course?
The IR remotes are unfortunately low quality. At least there are a lot of tv remotes, and you can program pypilot to work with most remotes.
I did play with 433mhz remotes a little, and I found that the cpu usage of the pi monitoring the io pin was very high of 20-30% and even then decoding isn't perfect. Despite filters, the automatic gain in the generic receivers makes it impossible to reduce cpu when there is no signal because the input is always changing.
Maybe a kernel module could do better. So I suggest an arduino or even attiny which can decode the 433mhz receiver more efficiently and accurately offloading this from the pi, and then it can communicate over serial, or io pins. This same arduino could decode capacitive touch buttons and perform other functions like temperature or other analog measurements.