I have a motorized iron man helmet I'm trying to operate remotely.
My plan was to make a remote small enough to hide in the piece of armor that covers the top of the hand with wires to a momentary button on the thumb. My hope was to use an infrared emitter and detector. Having the emitter coming out from the armor piece covering the top of hand and having the detector stashed under the chin of the helmet allowing for line of sight for ir signal.
The helmet is operated by a picaxe 8 pin proto board. This was copied nearly completely from xrobots.co.uk helmet instructions found on youtube. The boards operation comes from a single momentary switch that I replaced with a Detector (photo-diode) from radio shack #276-0142.
https://www.radioshack.com/products/radioshack-infrared-led-emitter-and-detector?variant=5717550213
This photo-diode works well as a switch when hit with a signal from my tv remote as well as a single led bulb flashlight at a range of 2-3 inches/ 5-8cm.
I had tried their (radio shacks) 38kHz 3 pin module in various circuit patterns that I found while searching a remote circuit. None worked as a switch and many of the circuits made the module get extremely hot. Through trial and error I have found the following circuit to work: using a 1 AA battery holder and a high output infrared led also from radio shack,
batt + to switch, switch to ir led +, ir led - to batt -. but this only has a range of 4 inches/ 10cm. Which is sadly not good enough. I'm looking for about 2.5 ft/75cm range(roughly arms length). Last thing I tried to increase range was putting a resistor of different sizes both before and after the ir led which I found suggested in other forums and resulted in nothing happening at all, even after replacing the single batt 1.5v with a 3 AAA 4.5v.
Please let me be clear, I have no idea what I'm doing. Up until a month ago when I started this project I could only expertly change batteries and plug things in. I'm an artist by trade, I could paint a photo real image a diode but couldn't tell you what the h it does. I spent most of today looking through previous posts on this forum as well as others and I'm no closer to making a remote with better range.
Help me All about circuits your my only hope.
My plan was to make a remote small enough to hide in the piece of armor that covers the top of the hand with wires to a momentary button on the thumb. My hope was to use an infrared emitter and detector. Having the emitter coming out from the armor piece covering the top of hand and having the detector stashed under the chin of the helmet allowing for line of sight for ir signal.
The helmet is operated by a picaxe 8 pin proto board. This was copied nearly completely from xrobots.co.uk helmet instructions found on youtube. The boards operation comes from a single momentary switch that I replaced with a Detector (photo-diode) from radio shack #276-0142.
https://www.radioshack.com/products/radioshack-infrared-led-emitter-and-detector?variant=5717550213
This photo-diode works well as a switch when hit with a signal from my tv remote as well as a single led bulb flashlight at a range of 2-3 inches/ 5-8cm.
I had tried their (radio shacks) 38kHz 3 pin module in various circuit patterns that I found while searching a remote circuit. None worked as a switch and many of the circuits made the module get extremely hot. Through trial and error I have found the following circuit to work: using a 1 AA battery holder and a high output infrared led also from radio shack,
batt + to switch, switch to ir led +, ir led - to batt -. but this only has a range of 4 inches/ 10cm. Which is sadly not good enough. I'm looking for about 2.5 ft/75cm range(roughly arms length). Last thing I tried to increase range was putting a resistor of different sizes both before and after the ir led which I found suggested in other forums and resulted in nothing happening at all, even after replacing the single batt 1.5v with a 3 AAA 4.5v.
Please let me be clear, I have no idea what I'm doing. Up until a month ago when I started this project I could only expertly change batteries and plug things in. I'm an artist by trade, I could paint a photo real image a diode but couldn't tell you what the h it does. I spent most of today looking through previous posts on this forum as well as others and I'm no closer to making a remote with better range.
Help me All about circuits your my only hope.