I love the Pololu Maestro. It allowed me to compete in the Sparkfun robot competition last month (with an ARM Linuxstamp). However, the lack of PPM forced me to get an expensive hobby-grade RC car. If it had PPM, it would work with many cheap, proportional control RC toy cars. You would need to solder a wire to the toy car control circuit, but robot builders would save over $100 by not choosing a hobby RC car.
PPM signals are described here:
pabr.org/pxarc/doc/pxarc.en. … pm6_signal
Is there a plan to support these signals in the future?
Hello.
We do not have any plans for such a feature (I also do not remember anyone else asking for it).
If you only need a few channels, as for a cheap RC toy car, you could get there with the Micro Maestro by putting two channel outputs into an OR gate. You might need to skip a channel and set that to some short pulse to get the right spacing between multiple channel pulses. For instance, you could have channels 0 and 2 going into your OR gate, and you’d get the two pulses out separated by the channel 1 pulse width (plus the few microseconds for the controller to switch between channels).
This approach wouldn’t work with the Mini Maestros, which generate multiple pulses simultaneously.
- Jan