Radio-Controlled Toys

A radio-controlled model (or RC model) is a model that is steerable with the use of radio control. All types of vehicles imaginable have had RC systems installed in them, including cars, boats, planes, and even helicopters and scale railway locomotives. more...

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History

Radio control has been around since the late 1800s with Nikola Tesla having demonstrated a remote control boat in 1893. The World War II era saw increased development in radio control technology. The Luftwaffe used controllable winged bombs for targeting Allied ships. During the 1950s pioneering work was done by enthusiastic amateurs to create valve based control units. Originally simple 'on-off' systems these evolved to use complex systems of relays to control speed and direction. The information was encoded by varying the signals mark/space ratio (pulse proportional). Rapidly commercial versions of these systems became available. The tuned reed system brought new sophistication, using metal reed switches to resonate with the transmitted signal and operate one of a number of different relays. In the 1960s the availability of transistor based equipment led to the rapid development of fully proportional servo-based systems, again driven largely by amateurs but resulting in commercial products. In the 1980s, integrated circuits made the electronics cheap, small and light enough for multi-channel fully proportional control to become widely available.

In the 1990s miniaturised equipment became widely available, allowing radio control of the smallest models, and by the 2000s radio control was commonplace even for the control of inexpensive toys. At the same time the ingenuity of modellers has been sustained and the achievements of amateur modelers using the latest technology has extended to such subjects as gas-turbine powered aircraft, aerobatic helicopters and submarines, to name but a few examples.

Before the days of radio control many models would use simple burning fuses or clockwork mechanisms to control flight or sailing times. Sometimes clockwork controllers would also control and vary direction or behaviour. Other methods included tethering to a central point (popular for cars and hydroplanes), round the pole control for electric model aircraft and control line (USA: u-control) for internal combustion powered aircraft!

Design

RC electronics have three essential elements. The transmitter is the controller. Transmitters have control sticks, triggers, switches, and dials at the user's finger tips. The receiver is mounted in the model. It receives and processes the signal from the transmitter, translating it into signals that are sent to the servos. The number of servos in a model determines the number of channels the radio must provide.

In recent years, electronic speed controllers (ESCs) have been developed to replace the old variable resistors, which were extremely inefficient. They are entirely electronic, so they do not require any moving parts or servos.

Read more at Wikipedia.org