New Flyer/Inventor Looking for Advice

DCSConcepts · Dec 31, 2014

Hi,

I'm a brand new Phantom 2 Vision + 3.0 owner. Just received it as a holiday gift from my family after months of not-so-subtle hints. I'm doing a lot of learning and video watching before I taker her up for the first time.

Anyway, during this learning process, being an inventor by nature, I had an idea for a feature I'd like to add/test on my machine once I'm a bit more experienced flying it.

My question is if there is a simple way to wirelessly activate, and power, a 3V device that I intend to attach to my Phantom. Assume for the discussion it's a simple 3V LED. I want to use a switch on my radio controller to turn on or off the LED attached to the Phantom. My preference is to use the battery power from the Phantom vs. adding a 3V battery (likely a coin or 2-AAA) to my device. I know this will reduce my flight time, but I'm OK with that for my purposes.

My other possible option is that the "LED" or device, may use 12V (it uses a more commonplace and cheaper part that is 12V). So any thoughts on powering a 12V device would be appreciated too.

Thank you for your help. I'm really looking forward to getting involved.

TimmyG94 · Dec 31, 2014

Unfortunately there was only 1 free channel left on the P2 Vision+ controller and it was reserved for the manual tilt on the camera.

The Vision app could be a LOT more versatile and allow more functions like you are asking about. I'd love to be able to turn on aftermarket LED lights, activate an air-drop servo, emit an audible locator, etc. right from the app.

I'm guessing that once competition really heats up in the drone market you will be seeing all kinds of features like this in the apps.

ianwood · Jan 1, 2015

You're better off tapping the main power source and using a DC-DC voltage converter than adding more batteries. I don't know if the P2V has any way off tapping spare channels. The non-vision can take an 8th channel if you use a 3rd party receiver.

Another option is to use a microcontroller that reads the CAN bus to perform actions. You could, for example, have it so that toggling S1 and S2 back and forth at the same time turns something on or off. Or have an RGB LED change it's hue based on how far away it is from the home point or how fast it is moving.

J.James · Jan 2, 2015

There are some really small adjustable out put step down converters that you can use to drop your voltage to what ever you need. But you will need to tap off from battery leads on the board. So that parts not to hard. and if what ever you use dont have a big currant load the amount of power used should be pretty negligible if its just some thing like some leds which only draw a few milliwatts.

One option I have thought of for being able to turn things on or off is by using a separate remote controlled relay board.. I have a few I use in some other projects that are pretty small and they run off of 12vdc and they dont draw much power except for what ever it takes to energize the micro relays in them to turn on a circuit. The ones I use for my projects have 4 channels and 4 relays. But you can get them in 2 channel or 16 and any thing in between. and they with a tiny transmitter thats about the size of a zippo lighter with one of them old fashion metal telescoping antennas on it and a button for each relay. and the range is pretty good at about 1000m line of site. and also they run in the 315MHZ Mhz range so it will not interfere with any thing. You could just attach the transmitter to the phantoms transmitter Or if you really wanted to go all out there is enough room to take the circuit board out of its case and internally mount it in side the phantoms tx and have the buttons on the face of the controller. I always thought it would be neat to make some rocket pods that could be attached to the landing skids and use some electric matchs to set off fire works such as bottle rockets or roman candles using on of them 1000m remote relay boards. lol

When my redneck side and my nerd side of my personality get drinking they come up with some crazy fun ideals.