Reverse Engineering a Toy Helicopter

 

 

Seems that reverse engineering remote control toys is becoming quite popular. Last week we saw an RC toy car get hacked so it could be controlled by an Arduino. Kerry Wong recently completed a project where he reverse engineered a toy helicopter. Many inexpensive remote control toys use IR light to transmit commands instead or conventional RF signals which is what Kerry is dealing with in this project. He built an IR receiver that he connected to his RIGOL 1052E scope to capture the pattern for the various remote control commands. Then he was able to generate the commands using an Arduino to send the commands to the helicopter with the original remote control. I am thinking that this will be tons of fun with a few scripted commands. Kerry has made all of the code available on his site.