boat

Reverse though.... that is an entirely different story. If my boat gets caught in-between a few rocks I obviously don't wanna go swimming after it. So I decided to add the reverse but be able to kill it with a switch so I didn't accidently knock it and crash when using my 3-in-1 as a plane.

Looking at the pinout of the transmitter and reciever we can see that the transmitters reverse signal is on pin 4. If power is applied to this pin then the same high signal will show up on the reverse pin (#10) on the recievers side. So we short the pin to power on the foreward control and go to measure what we get on the reciever.

Here you can see a picture of the underside of the PCB. There is the TX-2 Chip, and the silver thing is our remotes Crystal Oscillator, nothing else really of interest in this picture. The pin we're soldering to is the 4th pin along the bottom of the chip, we'll be doing this on the other side of the PCB though.

By simply popping open the recievers outter layer and connecting a multimeter to pin....AGHHHHHHH! THAT'S A FREAKING SMALL CHIP!!! (about 1 centimeter tall) I've never soldered something that small before. Come to think of it I havn't soldered much of anything before...

Well we'll get to that later. If you connect a multimeter between pin 10 and ground you get a nice healthy reading of ~1.5 volts which is what we expected to find. This will work fine to signal when we want to turn reverse on and off.

The Transmitter (TX):

Here are before and after pictures of where I soldered a wire onto the reverse of the left controller switch. The connection is the red wire that is soldered on at point D on the PCB.

Before: (sorry about the fuzzyness)

Since we want to be able to turn this on and off we'll run it to an external switch like so:

The red wire runs to the middle lead on the switch and we've attached a wire on the left lead that will go to our TX chip. You can see an LED built into the switch I used. I didn't connect it, although doing so you can let yourself know when the reverse switch is on or not. I ran the red wire on the left straight to the TX chip and soldered it onto pin #4 as seen below.

Here is the same shot from 2 other angles:

From the wiring standpoint we're done with the transmitter. When I originally soldered it I was unsure of exactly where I wanted to put my On/Off reverse switch (hence the long amount of wire that I ended up wrapping arround the post on the top left picture). I decided I'd put it above the right control stick on the top of the Remote. The reason being I didn't want it to get in my way, but I still wanted to see it fairly well from the front of the controller. I measured and marked of where I was going to dremel (left) then went to it. On the right you can see the finished and installed switch.

Here is a pic of the finished controller:

The Reciever (RX):

Now I told you earlier that the reciever end is small, and I wasn't kidding. I never got a "before" picture so you can see my soldering job already done in the picture below (orange wire). As you can see the entire PCB is about the size of my nuckle (and I'm a small guy).

I'd really never done (much) soldering before, and I'd never soldered to any kind of chip before. I was kinda nervous that I was gonna fry the chip, or drop a blob of solder on one of them tiny surface mount guys, and then I'd really be buggered. I practiced on a few small chips I'd ripped out of old dvd players and what not then went at it. Turned out great. I soldered it so that the wire was going up and over the chip and out the same side as all the other wires. This is going to go to the base of an NPN transistor that will be hooked up to a small motor with a prop affixed to it. Here's another picture of that soldering job almost identicle to the one above but I liked them equally so you get both.