Three years ago was shocked to learn that I had won a Crazyflie 2.0 for my entry in the 2015 Hackaday Prize. Pleasantly shocked, but shocked nonetheless. It turned out to be quite an entertaining little device, but I always had a difficult time with the controls. I just couldn't make my brain accept using my phone's touchscreen to command it and almost always ended up crashing. I already had a two-stick radio I'd bodged together out of a couple old R/C transmitter gimbals and a Sparkfun box. That used a NRF24L01+ to talk to my Wall-E bot, and was intended to be able to control multiple robots. I decided I'd re-program that to speak Crazyflie and have "normal" physical controls and maybe crash less.

old radio bits and the wall-e chassis

Right about that time I got a new job and went from being a stay-at-home dad to a work-at-home dad. Spending 40 hours a week in my office/lab-OR-a-tree for the job somehow made me want to spend less time in that room, and my projects stagnated. Time went on, weeks became months, I would periodically pull out the box o' parts and noodle around with case options and such. Nothing ever quite seemed to come together though and the parts all went back in the box under the bench.

Then a few weeks ago I was thrift store shopping with kiddo and acquired these gorgeous things:

inside the tower hobbies one I found a handwriiten date of Sept. 10, 1978

This was the kick in the pants I needed to revisit my custom transmitter idea. So I dismembered them both, cleaned them to a fare-thee-well, and finally decided to use the Tower Hobbies transmitter to be the basis of the rudRemote project. And, at long last, be able to fly my Crazyflie with stick controls instead of a phone!