This remote manage storage tank now takes its orders from a Raspberry Pi board. Well, really it’s taking orders from commands pushed to the RPi board through SSH. The manage plan works out rather well. utilizing a low-profile WiFi dongle the RPi immediately links to the wireless network when it is powered on. This makes it a snap to SSH into the device, as well as a much more easy to use controller will put a good front-end into play at a long time in the future.

But the genuine meat as well as potatoes of the hack is available in getting the RPi to speak with the tank’s circuitry. just getting the Heng long Tiger I remote manage storage tank apart shown to be a ton of work as the treads requirement to be eliminated to do so as well as there’s a great deal of screws holding it together. instead of just replacing all of the manage circuitry [Ian] wished to patch into the original controller. To do so he spent a bit of time analyzing the signals with an oscilloscope as well as found that commands were coming in a Manchester encoded format. He recognized what different packets were doing, utilized a transistor to safeguard the GPIO pin on his board, as well as now has full manage of the Tank. The final part of the hardware alteration was to power the RPi from the Tank’s battery.

After the break you can catch a demo of the reassembled storage tank sporting its new wireless controller.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSPcJL1CGjA