Yeah, I watched it again, and it's freaking cool but they don't even begin to explain how they built it. I have access to CNC lathes and tools and shit, but I'd never be able to just guess... But I have asked a friend of mine if he's up for a winter project, so who knows, maybe I'll build one. You could do commercial plowing with it or sell them! And I'm with you Koss, I'd put tracks on it. And I'd put a GPS receiver on it and automate every place I plowed. Show up, unload it wait for it to finish and move on... Profit!
------------------------------------------------------------------------ If you don't like donut, then leave it alone. Nobody force you to eat it.
What kind of range are you getting with the NRF24s? I'm thinking about playing with some R/C (boat/car/plane) ideas, but in the spirit of being a cheapskate I don't want to splash out 60 quid on a transmiter/receiver when I have various microcontrollers and xbox pads laying around.
Not a great deal in the house. I think I posted a video of someone testing the range of them with different antena types with those radios. They can go surprisingly far outside.
A mile?! OK I think they'll do fine for outside stuff!
Think I'll make a box with an arduino or Pi that has an nrf24 (with antena!) and a screen and maybe a few interface buttons to load/save profiles, and connect a 360 pad to it for a r/c controller. Fun project for the summer.
I'm thinking definitely a car and a boat, and a plane if I get adventurous/find some spare cash for a decent motor/prop.
There's definitely some decent quoted distances online.
I've got a huge antenna on my RPi and the regular antenna on my kitchen sensor and it sometimes drops out. That's only going through 2 walls, one being a fairly thick brick wall, oh and the RPi is next to the consumer unit so there might be a bit of noise there. Changing the 2.4GHz channel might help for me. If you're out in the open with very little 2.4GHz interference you should definitely get much better distances.
I thought they did frequency hopping? Or is that something else. I think for anything flying some fairly robust frequency hopping spread spectrum stuff would be a necessity. With all the unregulated stuff on 2.4 Ghz you never know when some random device could totally knock out your comms.
You can definitely set the channel. I assume it uses a default channel if you don't set one manually. There's a scanner sketch for the Arduino, maybe the Pi too, which shows interference on each channel.