ProfessorBoots 3D Printed FPV Excavator Puts You Straight in the Operator Seat

ProfessorBoots has tons of experience 3D-printing remote excavators that can climb boxes, scoop dirt, and crush cans. His latest version parks a three-axis camera in the cab and wires a chair that copies the layout of a full size machine, so a look to the left turns the camera left and a pair of pedals drive the tracks. The result is a backyard digger you operate as if you were sitting in a Caterpillar, only without diesel and without twenty acres.

CADDXFPV sent him a GM3 combo in February, a 46-gram gimbal that tracked head movements using Avatar HD goggles and held a 19-millimeter camera by pitch, roll, and yaw. He installed the first unit on a wheel loader and tested the Goggles L, which cost $199. At first, gazing around simply turning his head seemed bizarre in the greatest possible ways. The articulated steering on that loader shifted the vision in ways that his head did not, and the original cab simply would not fit over the camera. He let the idea lay for a time until that larger, tougher excavator was ready.

Fitting the gimbal required a significant expansion of the cab. He imported the camera model into CAD, cloned the previous cab, removed the most of the floor, and created a new frame with a hint of design. Because the video transmitter warms up enough to potentially burn skin, he added a printed enclosure to keep a fan above it rather than beneath the lens. An aesthetic bar across the front was supposed to clip the camera when tilted, but it didn’t work out, so he ripped it out, checked clearance, and reprinted the part. The FPV gear draws power from the same battery as the excavator and operates independently, thus the same camera works on both the ESP32-robotic and the conventional radio versions.

First-person view made some jobs much easier, like being able to glance down and see the pins instead of guessing from across the yard while coupling a bucket or thumb certainly sped things up. In reality, he drove the machine to a neighbor’s card shop with a $10 payment and a handwritten message simply because he could. Nobody answered the door on his first visit, but a later knock ultimately got him in. Many RC builders do not get to compose sentences like this.

Even with the handheld transmitter, he felt like he was playing with a toy. He desired swing and dipper on the left stick, boom, bucket, and thumb on the right, and footprints on his feet. Early on in the project, two ESP32 boards communicating via ESP-NOW accomplished this without the need to hack open a radio. Early joysticks were simply assembled from a game controller with some printed extensions and springs purchased from Harbor Freight. The joysticks were dead in the middle, making fine motions clumsy, and the springs were simply too soft overall. He rebuilt the sticks with 10K potentiometers and bearings, superglued down the handles, and replaced the soft springs with firmer ones. The code now samples the resting point at boot-up and sets it as the center, so worn pots and printed parts that shift slightly over time do not cause problems.

Pedals began with a basic potentiometer pivot that allowed for proportional speed control. What happened next was a bit of a hack: both feet lifted the entire base off the ground. Then he added a printed lock, moved the spring supports further out to enhance resistance, and replaced the soldered wires with tidy plugs, allowing the entire pedal unit to be easily removed from the chair. It turns out that the signal dropouts he was seeing were caused by a residual board setting from the Bluepad32 days. Swapping the sketch to a standard ESP32 development board significantly reduced the lag. Later, a small custom PCB arrived and resolved the tangled wiring by mounting everything on neatly organized terminal blocks. He also added a fuse, battery mounts, and a power switch to prevent anything from being soldered directly to the chip.

The chair’s PLA began warping in the summer heat, pulling a spring plate completely out of shape. So he recreated the chair pieces in PETG but preserved the existing pots and bearings. Not long after, he created a desk-mounted version with the same controls, but without the office chair. Yeah, it turns out you can build the entire thing for about $60, assuming you already have an excavator and a chair. To be honest, he prefers the cheaper Goggles L more than the costly pair he purchased later. The pricey ones leaked light and required some printed shims to fix.

The ESP-NOW has a somewhat lesser range than a typical radio, but it nevertheless managed to control the machine in the yard from indoors. The problem was that it only worked for about thirty minutes before becoming clogged with dirt. His brother tested the chair and reported that it felt similar to a real excavator. Later, he used the same goggles to check under a porch to see if a neighbor’s cat was hiding; he had to tape a headlamp to the goggles to get a good look. Voltage sag killed the feed on the first pass, however fresh batteries fixed it no trouble. Unfortunately, that particular location wound up on a shortlist alongside crawl spaces and wasp nests.