chunkulator
Joined: 27 Jul 2016
Posts: 219
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Radio review: TGY-i6S
I recently bought one of these because it looked like a promising cheap radio system:
https://hobbyking.com/en_us/i6s-afhds-2a-white-mode1-6ch-radio-with-colour-box.html
I liked the look of it because:
- It comes with two receivers, one with 6 servo outputs and one with PPM/sbus/ibus output for hooking up to microcontrollers.
- It has a mix function.
- It has lots of assignable switches, buttons (two triggers on the back) and extra controls which should be great for weapons.
- You can plug it into your PC to upgrade the firmware (v 2.0 is already available)
- The new firmware has all kinds of nice settings including exponential/stick curve adjustments.
The main issues:
- The mix function is useless for skid steer robots. It only allows you to mix one slave channel into one master channel: y' = y + ax. However, for skid steer you need a matrix mix: y' = y + ax, x' = x + by. But I thought maybe you could use a VTail mixer with it.
- I've had troubles using the HobbyKing Vtail mixer (https://hobbyking.com/en_us/turnigy-v-tail-mixer-ultra-small.html) before because it doesn't failsafe. If your robot looses contact with the transmitter, the VTail keeps doing whatever it was last told to do. You won't pass a safety check with that behaviour.
- However, the TGY-i6S has fully programmable failsafes, so you can manually tell the receiver what it should do when it looses contact with the transmitter. This means you can use the TGY-i6S with a VTail mixer to drive skid steer robot just fine.
- As with most transmitters it comes with only 3 out of 4 gimbal axes sprung. For non-spinner use you generally want all 4 sprung. However, I've seen rumours on YouTube that there are versions of this transmitter (branded FlySKy rather than Turnigy) available on Banggood.com which come with all four gimbal axes sprung.
In summary, it's a pretty nice cheap radio for robots, but you need a Vtail mixer. I plan to use it on one of my upcoming bots.
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