Meatball Racing

Radio Control Blog

Left Handed RC Transmitters

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My daughter is left handed and she also loves to drive R/C cars with dad and her brother. To make sure she has a good experience, she needs the appropriate tool – a proper left handed RC transmitter. I’ve seen several lefties use standard right-handed transmitters. They hold the grip in their right hand to work the trigger, and the steering wheel faces away, so they reach around the front to work the steering with their left hand.

My left-handed daughter instinctively did just this with a normal transmitter (Tx). Even at only 5 years old, her brain told her to steer with her dominant hand. While it works for many, it’s unfortunate. Left-handed transmitters are not widely available for people entering the hobby, so they try to make it work with a right-handed Tx. By the time they can afford a model that can be converted to left-handed, they’ve already gotten used to contorting themselves, so what should seem natural feels strange.
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Flysky iA6 RX – telemetry and failsafe with OpenTX

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I ordered an iA6 receiver for a flying wing I picked up at the local R/C swap meet. It took 30 days to get here from China. 😒 How have I not learned not to order stuff during the Chinese New Year? Once I got it, there were a few tricks and troubles I went through, so here’s the rundown.

I specifically purchased the Turnigy iA6 (same as FS-iA6) instead of the iA6B for a few reasons. It has leads coming off of the top instead of the end, so it’s effectively shorter when servo connectors are plugged in. Perfect for the Techone Mini-Popwing which has a small receiver cut-out. It also has a rudimentary telemetry system built in, and the first version (non-B) can be hacked very easily to provide battery voltage telemetry to the transmitter.

The telemetry hack is well covered in the RCGroups link above, so I won’t go into it, but will outline a couple other issues I encountered.

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Best budget flying radio: Taranis Q X7

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Hands down this is the best radio you can get for around $100. The hobby is moving so fast, it’s incredible what this thing can do! When it first came out, I was skeptical as the go-to radio for most people flying multi-rotors was the Taranis X9D. The X7 has a form-factor very similar to the first Horus which was not initially well-received. But what FrSky had done with the X7 was take everything that was awesome about the X9D (OpenTX, haptic and audio feedback, telemetry, serial module communication) and put it in a Horus-shaped budget package.

I’m not going to go through everything about this radio, there are plenty of other reviews out there – several linked to from here. I just want to suggest an awesome setup that will not only do telemetry with FrSky receivers, but also Spektrum, FlySky, and any other multiprotocol module protocols that support telemetry.

This is a great complete transmitter/receiver setup that will cost you less than $200 and will control just about everything:

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Multiprotocol Transmitter Module

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I can’t say enough about pascallanger and others who have worked to put together the open source 4-in-1 multiprotocol module. It’s a collection of all of the transmitter protocols that are open source, or have been reverse engineered, compiled into one. Combined with the 4-in-1 module hardware, you can control a huge variety of models with different receivers and protocols with the same transmitter. And now you can get it as a ready to use module for $40.

With the 4-in-1 I’ve been able to fly:

  1. Inductrix (Tiny Whoop) bind-and-fly (DSM Protocol)
  2. Assault 100 (HiSky HT-8 Protocol)
  3. FT Flyer with FlySky receiver
  4. FT Snowball with FlySky receiver
  5. FT Tiny Trainer with HobbyKing HK-T6A-V2 receiver (FlySky protocol)
  6. XK K110 bind-and-fly micro-heli (Futaba SFHSS Protocol)

It will work with several other protocols including SLT for AnyLink models and RealFlight simulator.
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