I had the opportunity to play with an Alien Microfly flying saucer a couple of weeks ago and I HAD to have one. This is an very nicely designed version of the ubiquitous flysaucers that have been around for a while. It is about 1/6 the size of the previous saucers and is IR controlled. It actually flies around the living room pretty well! It seems to be pretty robust. It has survived both my five your old daughters “flying” and the family dog. After a couple of dozen crashes from 10 feet or so, it still runs fine.
Since it is IR controlled, it is a perfect candidate for the USB-UIRT. The output of the remote on the scope looks like this a continuous series of pulses that are modulated in width from 6ms down to about 4ms. The pulse width is proportional to the propeller speed.
Capturing this with the USB-UIRT turns out to be non trivial. However it turns out that if you send out any kind of stream that approximates the timing of the remote, the UFO will fly.
Here is a quick video of the first flight(NOT VERY EXCITING!)
