I'm Tobi and I'm new here. My passion for 3D printing is what got me into model building, tanks in particular. Right now I'm building the KF51 Panther, and my previous models are the Tiger II, Abrams, Leopard 2A7 and the PzH 2000.
The thing I eventually got hung up on wasn't the printing, it was the electronics. For driving, sound, light, smoke and the turret I needed several separate modules, a lot of cabling, some soldering, and the whole thing gets configured over DIP switches or some PC tool. For every little change I had to take it all apart again.
So I built my own: two custom boards, one for the remote and one for the tank, with a plug-and-play system on top. I'm a software developer by trade, so I wrote a web app to go with it, a kind of no-code configurator.
An example: the barrel raises and lowers with a servo. In the app I just say "the barrel elevation is on servo 1", give it a name, and set what it should do. Same on the remote side, I tell it what's plugged in and what it should control. Right now I can add and freely assign single- and dual-axis sticks, 3-position switches, buttons and potentiometers.
Short 10-minute video of the configurator: https://youtu.be/17Ius1GWN0Y
What you can connect to the vehicle board:
- Smoke generator
- Speaker
- 4x DC motors (e.g. N20)
- 6x servo ports
- 2x ESC speed controllers (for 380 or 540 size motors)
- IR battle system (receiver + LED)
- 2x LED hubs, 16 individually configurable LEDs each
For sound I went with an action-based approach: action sounds on a button press, motion sounds triggered by movement (move a stick, with a start, sequence and end sound), plus the classic engine sounds.
Now I'd really like to hear what you think:
Is it too complicated, too simple, actually useful? I'd rather have honest feedback than polite feedback.
And one question that genuinely keeps nagging at me: would something like this be interesting for other models too, trucks, excavators, cars, robotics? Or do you only see it making sense for tanks? Or at all? It helped me a huge amount with my own builds, at least.
Cheers,
Tobi
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