Gamepad RC Stack

I mentioned in a previous icarus post that the RC commands are going to come from a dedicated board. This is more inline with your typical FC stack up and it offloads the compute time for the RF communication to another processor.

And for whatever reason I really want to be able to use my DualShock 4 controller so it has to be bluetooth.

This an ESP32 in a 20x20mm FC electronics stack form factor. It uses the Bluepad32 library to connect to any bluetooth controller and sends the controller data over UART to the flight controller.

Design

Power Supply

3.3V linear regulator. Input is just from two pin. No USB connector or USB-UART IC to save space.

MCU

The design is as simple as it gets. It’s just the ESP32-WROOM with decoupling capacitors, two buttons for reset and bootloader mode and two leds for general status and connection status.