I recently finished designing my first RC/3D Print project - a radio controlled tugboat with functional azimuth thrusters that rotate 360º.
Both the controller and the boat are powered by ESP32 using NRF21L01 radio modules for communication.
My initial thinking was to use joysticks to control the thrusters but after thinking about it decided they wouldn't be ideal as they snap back to center when let go. Instead I used rotary encoders to control each azimuth thruster independantly. Turning the knobs on the controller sends the angle data to the tugboat which then turns 2 stepper motors to match the angles of the knobs.
During testing I quickly realised that without being able to see the thrusters and their current angles it made controlling the boat much more difficult. This is because it takes some time for the thrusters to catch up with the angle set on the controls. To solve this I added an OLED screen to the controller which gets feedback from the tugboat to display the actual angle of each thruster on the screen.
If you're iterested you can see the code on Github (https://github.com/stuartbnz/ASDThrustersESP32) and download the STL files for free from Printables 😁