[John Gutmann]

I think and easy thing to do would be buy a crappy transmitter for the heli, then gut it out. What you can do is hook that up to your micro controller and get some Digital->Analog converters and hook them up to all the pots. this way you can have you micro controller control it while you still have it hooked up to your computer and you can play with the values.

Second thing is make sure you have a transmitter handy while you are doing this and have the same crystal in it. This way if things get out of control you can turn off the one for you micro controller and take over manual control.

Third, get a trainer for the heli, this will allow you to still fly but not more then like 5-10 feet if that. Now if you crash it won't be as bad or as expensive.

Now depending on how much money you wanna spend you can put the transmitter with the micro controller on board the heli this way you will always have communication, but you can still get interference. they other way would to be to totally hack the whole system. write code for the gyro and motor controller and servos yourself, then have a radio modem so you can talk to your computer on the ground.