RC Tank Warfare community hobby forum

TLDWTR (Too long, don't want to read): I will be attempting a Marine Corps specific Heng Long M1A2 Abrams (which I think is historically inaccurate) that features full artificial intelligence along with the tricky mod of getting BBs to fire while the cannon emits smoke at the same time. I can't find anyone online or youtube who has done this, so my small son and I are going to give it a shot.

More detail if interested:

I am doing a Marine Corps specific Heng Long Abrams build and will probably need a bunch of guidance and help. I am the father of a small, gifted boy who is very mature for his age and who wanted to try an RC tank. I tried to get him to look at some of the great WW2 Panzer models but he wanted to try an Abrams. We would like to eventually enter our Abrams in IR battles against other humans but use a novel artificial intelligence system to kill their tanks without ours being "hit." (Meaning that our tank will require no human control from a transmitter. It will also "learn" from every defeat it suffers.) We also want to get BB firing to work with the cannon smoke mod (along with the barrel recoil and 360 rotation mods). I don't know a great deal about HL tanks or all the specific aftermarket parts you can buy for them but if anyone knows of Marine Corps specific Abrams parts or decals, please point me to them. (I would love to locate some 1/16th scale Marine Corps decals and the Marine specific eight-barrel smoke canister launcher if I can.) I will detail the "MEP3" part of my build a bit later. Some of the mods I have done or will be trying to do, include:

1 - I won't be adding too many metal parts to our Abrams because battery run times are longer for plastic and there will be less stress on the hull. (For my small son and I as beginners, I don't see a need to go with a $1500 all metal build.)
2 - I have already reinforced the resin hull with some aluminum struts.
3 - I will probably keep the HL 7.0 MFU for now because my small son isn't really concerned with say, advanced recoil features or turnable remote weapons stations. Eventually, when A.I. is working, I will have to mate the 7.0 to an Arduino (or other) board (or emulate it).
4 - I have already added a battery charging port accessible through the top hull (Pics to follow).
5 - I have upgraded the rear smoker unit. I may upgrade it further bc even though the M1A2 does not burn extra fuel to generate smoke, I would still like the feature for my son. My eventual goal is to get the voluminous smoke similar to what comes out of RC tugboats and such (may have to be modified since they take up so much room).
6 - I have upgraded the gear train to full steel gears running on bearings. It is not the absolute best option like those found in the RC Tamiya Abrams or full metal builds, but we don't have much weight to push around either.
7 - I have left the stock speaker unit alone for now. It has four levels and is more than loud enough for us to hear on the lowest level even from 30 meters away.
8 - I upgraded the battery to a 5000 mAh unit that is NIMH. Lipo is too much of a pain for kids.
9 - I cut away the battery box so that I can have a nice flat bottom to mount everything to. This allows more room for the 360 rotation mod. It also will allow for very fast battery changes if we need to.
10 - I purchased a Tenergy TB6-B charging unit to refill the batteries. (I recharge them at 0.5 amps very slowly over hours.)
11 - I will be custom modding the BB Firing unit to give the BB's about 25% more range. (And be able to have cannon smoke while firing the BBs!)
12 - The HL Abrams version 7.0 is already wired up for Heng Long's IR battle system (which I heard is inferior to Tamiya's). We will be installing the Tamiya IR Battle System at the same time we work on the A.I.
13 - Our Abrams already has the cannon recoil mod, but we will be further modding it to allow for increased cannon movement and firing while smoking.
14 - I have already installed a 360 turret mod. After some trial and error, I now have this working with cannon smoke and BB firing.
15 - The Cannon Barrel smoke mod is now installed and working with BB firing. (Pain in the a##!) (Pics to follow)
16 - I wired in the crappy FPV wireless camera system to the CITV sight for now. I will have to upgrade down the road so the A.I. has detailed sensor input. (Pics to follow)
17 - I will upgrade the tank to the MEP3 package, which is somewhat different from the SEP or TUSK packages found on current U.S. Army Abrams.
18 - I will be detailing the tank a little bit. I am not the best painter or airbrusher but since my son likes Warhammer 40K painting, we will try our best.
19 - I have ordered a modern Abrams tank commander resin figure. I will be repainting his uniform in a Marine Corps BDU cameo pattern.
20 - I will be adding some custom flags to the antennae.
21 - The only metal parts I will be using are the steel gears and the driving sprockets. I have seen numerous posts of people who own the "professional" models with metal wheels and tracks that then suffer cracks in their resin hulls. Part of the reason for this is less fatigue on the hull combined with longer running times per battery size.
22 - I have modified the top and bottom hulls to mate using magnets. Couldn't imagine taking out seven screws every time I needed to check the internals.
23 - I have modified the rear drive sprockets to run on bearings.
24 - The Abrams came with tension adjusters for the two front idler wheels, but I may run a Hennetec Idler system if needed (or custom make something similar).

25 - By far the hardest mod: I will at the end of this build install an Arduino board running a custom A.I. (machine learning) algorithm. After a learning process (training on hundreds of thousands of samples), we will enter our Abrams in IR battles and if successful, our Abrams will "hunt" down other tanks and kill them without any human control (while hopefully avoiding any human controlled tanks trying to kill us). We will see how our Abrams does against experienced (human) controllers. I am an electrical and neural engineer who works extensively with the mathematics of artificial intelligence algorithms, and I want to use this project to help educate my son.

26 - We may or may not be making custom "soft" BBs that leave a small (washable) mark when fired. Something I am curious to try.

If there are other mods I am missing, please fill me in. Our end goal is to end up with a pretty cool Marine Corps specific Abrams (even though it may not be historically accurate).

So, first up are a few pics of the battery charging mod. I dislike the battery box and plate on the underside of the Abrams, and I did not want to have to remove the top hull every time to charge the battery. Because of space limitations, I went with Deans connectors because they can fit in small spaces and handle the current we will be using just fine.
Below the red Deans female connector is a small metal plate supporting the connector so that I can push down the male connector firmly in without snapping off the resin holder.

With the top hull on, I now how this
Now, we just have to remember to have the turret turned a bit so that we can have access when we shut down for the day.

The second most difficult mod of this build is trying to get the BBs to fire while the cannon smokes, ... and then making this work with a recoiling barrel and a 360 rotation mod. I watched a few vids online from Stanlley Tai at RC Tank Legion in Malaysia and a few other guys but they all routed the cannon smoke tubing up through the BB firing unit. They ran a LED down the cannon, so that when the cannon "fires," the LED goes off at the end of the cannon and smoke comes out of the barrel, ... but the LED and the tubing block the ability of BBs to be fired. I wanted BBs to come out of the cannon with smoke right after. I could spend paragraphs describing what I did but better to post a few pics instead:

(You will need a drill and dremel tool to do the mods below plus some soldering skills and/or JB Weld.)

Step 1 - Adding an aluminum "receptor" tube to the inner barrel to accept the cannon smoke tubing. I had to drill a slanted hole in the inner cannon barrel and then cut a piece of aluminum tubing just wide enough to accept the tubing coming in from the smoker unit. I then reshaped the end of the aluminum receptor tube with a dremel tool to perfectly mate against the inner barrel. I put the receptor tube at a 45 degree angle on purpose so that most of the ejected smoke travels down the barrel to outside, rather than back inside the tank to the BB firing unit.
Step 2 - Cutting the aluminum outer barrel so that it has room to slide down over my mod and the inner barrel.
Step 3 - Reattach the unit together. (Although you can not see it in the pics, I also made a custom pull plate so that the barrel gets to move about 30% further, which makes the barrel recoil action more dramatic.)
Step 4 - Hooking up all the wiring. My job was made a bit easier by utilizing this wiring kit made specifically for cannon smoke + 360 degree rotation by Toucan Hobby:
I then followed the directions in Part II of this video (from the 2:10 time mark):



Step 5 - Affix the cannon smoke components to the inside of the Abrams turret. (The tubing only enters the cannon attachment tube for about 6 or 7 mm.) I attached the main smoker unit under the Loader's hatch access. I also moved the IR attachment port to the side.
How does it all work? .... in a word, ... excellent. We now have BB firing + cannon smoke + recoiling barrel + 360 rotation. Because of the extra switch affixed to the BB firing unit, .. the smoke comes like 1/5th of a second after the BB fires, which is exactly what we wanted. I will try to get a video posted shortly.

In order to get true artificial intelligence up and running on the Abrams, we need a processor and sensor suite that handle the code and timing that will be needed to defeat real humans. Unfortunately, a Heng Long 7.0/7.1 MFU or Clark or IBU does not have the processing power or is able to accept the sensor inputs that we will need to get the job done. I am considering several boards but will probably stick with one of the Arduino kits if I can. Why Arduino you might ask? So other ambitious modders can follow our thread and because Arduino kits are available worldwide and tend to be cheap. A huge amount of guides and How To's are also available to the beginner. If successful, other tankers will be able to follow our project for less than $150. Still checking, but it does not look like their classic Uno Revision 3 will be able to get the job done:
We will probably have to go with a Mega or Giga board.

Items we will have to account for as we consider boards:

1 - Will the processor run our code in the time needed to defeat real humans?
2 - Can the board accept the sensor suite we will need to detect other tanks?
3 - How hard will it be to make it electrically compatible with say, a 7.4 volt NIMH battery? (And of course, how wattage hungry is our processor? What size battery will we need to power it for say 30 min or more?)
4 - How easy or difficult will it be for our Arduino to mate to say, a Heng Long 7.0 MFU? If we can't mate them, how hard will it be to run the Heng Long MFU in emulation?
5 - Will we have room for the board and sensor suite in our Abrams?

Stay tuned, .... never tried to make an A.I. RC tank before, LOL

I don't know a whole lot about the Abrams tank (outside of the Wikipedia entry) but it seems like the Marine Corps mainly used the M1A1-FEP variant. The only real differences I can see visually are the smoke canisters and the different markings.
Are these the only two differences between US Army and USMC Abrams? Did any Marine Corps Abrams get the SEP or TUSK packages? Thanks to any experienced tankers who can help me out!

Aurelius wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 7:06 am TLDWTR (Too long, don't want to read)

That reminded me of this lol. . . . Anyway, sorry, can't stop to chat, I have a rather long post to read

Are we allowed to ask military questions, son of a gun-ner? (If not, please advise, ... I mean no offense.)

Curious to see what the tankers in these forums think of the US Marine Corps decision to give up their Abrams? I am no four-star general with forty years of experience but tanks have been used at amphibious landings throughout the 20th century. My military history is a bit rusty but I think tanks were used at Normandy, Iwo Jima, Inchon, etc .... If the Marine Corps is rethinking tactics for possibly taking Chinese sand bars in the South China Sea, I would think they would want to have a tank battalion or so for each Marine division? What say the tank experts?

Aurelius wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 1:54 pm Are we allowed to ask military questions, son of a gun-ner? (If not, please advise, ... I mean no offense.)

Oh yeah, we talk and debate about lots of things military, after all, we'd have to have some military interests to have a liking/respect for machines of war

We really are quite laid back, you go for it

Aurelius wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 1:54 pm Are we allowed to ask military questions, son of a gun-ner? (If not, please advise, ... I mean no offense.)

Curious to see what the tankers in these forums think of the US Marine Corps decision to give up their Abrams? I am no four-star general with forty years of experience but tanks have been used at amphibious landings throughout the 20th century. My military history is a bit rusty but I think tanks were used at Normandy, Iwo Jima, Inchon, etc .... If the Marine Corps is rethinking tactics for possibly taking Chinese sand bars in the South China Sea, I would think they would want to have a tank battalion or so for each Marine division? What say the tank experts?

Maybe post this in general discussion in a separate post. We have discussed similar things, like, has time run out for tanks, past their prime, etc. Dominance of the sky has proven itself many times, although, helicopters can't really hide behind buildings for long.

Aurelius wrote: ↑Thu Feb 08, 2024 1:54 pm Curious to see what the tankers in these forums think of the US Marine Corps decision to give up their Abrams? I am no four-star general with forty years of experience but tanks have been used at amphibious landings throughout the 20th century. My military history is a bit rusty but I think tanks were used at Normandy, Iwo Jima, Inchon, etc .... If the Marine Corps is rethinking tactics for possibly taking Chinese sand bars in the South China Sea, I would think they would want to have a tank battalion or so for each Marine division? What say the tank experts?

I'm not a US Marine expert nor have I served so I couldn't answer for them, but for sure I'd want a big capable tank when needed. I do study and research military history and doctrine. From what I gather and also what you are eluding to is what has been made public of the U.S. Marine Corps reorganization and streamlining. They are moving from what they had become which was an occupational land force in many ways to a more dynamic mobile amphibious force. Much of what is shared may be propaganda but logistics wise it makes sense their retirement of the Abrams MBT. I say this Only based on what has been shared publicly of their shifting doctrine.

Oh, and nice work BTW. Keep it up!