I know I’ll probably be jumped for being a terrible person supporting the corporate greed. This is, unfortunately, just another step in the evolution of drive-by-wire or technology in control of our heavy metal devices.

It’s happened to aircraft and other equipment in the past. Yeah, there are a lot of things which could have been done to prevent this situation, but as the technology becomes more advanced there will be things overlooked, misunderstood and not expected. These experiences and flaws will help resolve the problems for many generations to come, build a stronger understanding of the systems and their integration with each other and result in safer systems in the long run.

Most complex concepts seem like ‘common sense’ once the problem or solution is understood. Before it happens they’re not even a consideration. It’d make a great movie if an engineer knew the cause beforehand and warned the company, but the cost of a 4 cent part was ‘too much’ for corporate greed, so they left it out, causing mass death and destruction, however; While a possibility, it’s not likely. Chances are it’s something that’s only obvious after it’s discovered.

What the manufacturer does in response to the discovery of a problem plays a large role in the grand scheme of things, and it’s not my intent to get into that debacle with this post. This is just intended as a general thought on the costs of technology advancement and integration into daily lives.

I am not trying diminish the bad experiences or damaged lives from this in any way, those people will probably never understand or care why something happened or how many times a similar thing has happened in the past.  Introducing technology to a large populous usually has some undesired side-effects and affects people in good and bad ways, usually good. You can never repair lives or companies overall reputation but technological advances have always come with a price paid in blood.

I have owned smart phones before, a Palm Treo way back when, the Blackberry Storm through work, and while not a phone, I do have an iPod Touch which runs most of the iPhone apps that don’t require phone, camera or mic. I have also worked with iPhones for work. I really didn’t want to wait for Apple to distribute the iPhone outside of AT&T and likewise did not want to switch to Verizon to get a Droid.

I’ve had the Nexus One a few weeks now, and for the most part it’s a great little phone, I’ve not run into any ’showstopper’ issue personally, nor have I really run into any functionality issues in general. It feels comfortable in the palm has a bit of a rubberized grippy backside so it doesn’t slide around and overall the user interface is very easy to get around. After spending a couple of hours one evening with it I was pretty comfortable with most of the features.

When you first turn the phone on it’s asks you for an existing Google account to link to. This is optional but I went ahead and set it up. It automatically imported my email, contacts and calendars, etc from Google with no hassle at all.

The phone works fine as a phone, my dad said it sounded a little ‘hollow’ like it was missing high and low frequencies off the mic. I was a bit dissapointed to hear about that. I haven’t tried it with a blue-tooth headset to see if that improves the way it sounds. It was clear, just lacked depth. When you hold the phone up to your face, it senses that and shuts down the display and touchscreen. When you move the phone away from your face it turns them back on.

The buttons are pretty straightforward with power on the top, and volume on the sides. Like the iPod Touch and iPhone the volume buttons can get in the way when in portrait mode, but it just requires a bit more training to hold the phone right so you don’t bump them.  I don’t get a lot of use out of the trackball yet as I mostly use the touchscreen. I was told it was a multi-color LED under there, but so far I’ve not seen any apps that let you manipulate it so I’ve only seen it glow white. If there is an RGB LED under the trackball it’d be nice to be able to set different colors for different alerts.  Right now when you have a new notification it just slowly pulses white every few seconds. According to a post on androidcommunity.com  this is in the process of being remedied and the recent software update may have solved that.

The AMOLED display looks amazing and crisp for a 3.7″ display. The touch screen is responsive, however you have to be careful not to let the edges of your phone-holding-hand touch the edges of the glass part of screen or it will mess up interaction and make it seem likes it’s not being responsive at all. This is not so much a hassle, as just training yourself to hold the phone properly.

The camera works alright, the quality is what one might expect from a cell phone camera. The Nexus One camera is 5 megapixels and accompanied by a super bright LED for a ‘flash’.  I’ll attach some photos from the phone to this post so you can see the quality yourself. There are some apps that let you use Android camera flash LEDs as strobe lights or flashlights, but the LED in there is not meant to be powered on for long periods of time in and such use may result in failure of the LED.

Additionally the Nexus One has Google’s voice recognition software which works well in my experience. While there will always be some things that just don’t translate well for speech recognition, for the most part it pics up things very well. If you click the mic button on the Google Search bar that is on the main apps page of the phone, it will google search your request. With the maps you can give it a command to ‘Navigate to <address>’ and it will process, then ask you to verify your request with a high success rate.  You can also enter your SMS text messages by voice, though it’s a bit redundant to use a phone to do speech recognition in order to send a text message to someone.

The Nexus music player works fine for listening to music though there are no outstanding features from other players. The ability to just attach the phone to your PC and upload your music onto the SD card is great. I don’t think I’ll be using my iPod Touch too much in the future as this phone provides all of the same functionality of the iPod Touch

As of today I downloaded the update for the N1 and manually installed it using these directions. The update adds multi-touch to certain applications of the Nexus One, and is supposed to improve the G3 problems some people have been reporting with their phones, although the latest reports show there may still be some bugs to work out in that sector. If it’s a concern for you I would recommend doing a search about it and reading recent posts on the subject.

THE APPS

There are around 20,000+ applications available on the Android Market, it works pretty much like the iTunes App Store for the iPod Touch and iPhone. There are many free applications, games and other things available, and plenty of pay apps as well. I’ve found a few great apps and games so far and I’m sure more will come out.

There are some apps pre-installed in the phone. One of my favorites aside from all the basic tools is Google Sky. Google sky takes your GPS position and uses the compass and accelerometers inside of the phone to show you in real time where all of the stars are.  If you sit in a room in your house and find the moon on your Android screen it shows you exactly where the moon is in relation to yourself. Very cool to play with.

The built in maps and navigation will let you find anything, and you can use the voice recognition to find locations as well.  If you press the small microphone button and say ‘navigate to Radio Shack’ to the phone, it will pop up a list of Radio Shacks for you to choose. Same with other stores or businesses.  Very convenient and easy to use.

Work Apps

Network Discovery by Aubort Jean-Baptiste is also free and lets you scan your local LAN or WLAN to find other devices and do port scans as well. It’s a handy little network tool.

Remote Desktop Client from Xtralogic is $20 but I think it’s worth the price. It’s an excellent remote desktop client, the screen works as a track-pad on a laptop. Rather than direct cursor positioning where you touch, you drag the cursor around by dragging on the screen. Additionally there’s a pop-up keyboard that lets you send extended key commands to the remote system.

ConnectBot by Kenny Root and Jeffrey Sharkey is a nice little SSH app although it’s not loaded with features, and may not be for everyone.

Personal Apps

Gmail Unread Count by Andrew Blom is free, and just replaces the gMail icon on your phone’s screen the gMail icon with the number of unread messages in a little red circle next to it.

Trapster from trapster.com is a great integrated app with live updates from other users as to the location and types of speed traps, traffic cameras and other troublesome things one might encounter while on the road. This app will probably be more useful when an actual Nexus car dock is released.

wpToGo from Roundhill Labs is free and lets you update your WordPress Blog from your Android phone. While I find phone entry for a blog is not convenient, I know others blog on the go and may find this valuable. Perhaps one day I’ll shoot a photo while at the flying field and write a short little article to go with it. Time will tell.

Foxy Photo Editor by DeckEleven Entertainment is a handy little tool that allows some basic manipulation of your photos. Take the photo and then modify or crop as desired. It lets you transform, rotate, touch up with brushes, title, add clipart, etc.

Utility Apps

Advanced Task Killer Free from ReChild works pretty nice. It’s a task manager app that lets you kill battery hogging processes on your phone that may be running in the background. There are a variety of task killer apps out there, this one had good ratings so I ended up checking it out.

Audalyzer and Wildspecta Mobile Lite, these are both free spectral analyzers which use the mic as the input source. While they’re probably not very accurate, they are fun to play with and might help you get some info you need in a tough spot.

Phonalyzr lets you see way more statistics than you ever wanted to about your texting and phoning habits, breaking your phone usage down by day and type of use, incoming and outgoing use, time, etc.

Games!

Trap! by Matt Wachowski is a fun and somewhat addictive game.  You isolate a number of balls which bounce around the screen by drawing lines between them.  By getting different multipliers and power-ups you increase your score. I’ve managed to score over  600k points on one level before, but I hear you can get into millions of points.  It’s a good time waster for when you’re on a plane or what not.

Space Physics by Camel Games is another good game. You use your finger to draw lines and gears and wheels to move a ball from one location to the target, or multiple targets. It’s a good puzzle game that can absorb you.

Misc Apps

Barcode Scanner by ZXing team is free and uses the camera on the phone to scan bar codes and then run them through Google to find matches. It works pretty good with UPC numbers and other standard barcode formats to bring up results, competitive pricing, etc. This is more of a toy though, I don’t need a barcode scanner and search engine to tell me that if I walk into a Best Buy and see something, it’ll be cheaper online.

Summary

Overall I feel this will be a great phone for my personal use for several years to come. I don’t always need to have the latest and greatest toys on a constant basis, but when I do upgrade my devices and equipment I go for what I feel is the best option out there for myself and will last me at least several years. There are a ton of useful applications for time management and productivity as well as games, networking, social networking and other things out there to suit most peoples needs. One app I would like to see for Android / the Nexus One is one that uses the mic to determine the RPM of a running 2-cycle engine or frequency of a repetitive sound in numerical format.

I hope every had a great Christmas and New Years this year and kept plenty warm.  Things were good here and I did a little after the holidays shopping as well.  I picked up the Novus CP from my local hobby shop in Kingston and was admittedly an ‘impulse’ buy.

The kit is sold as Ready-to-Fly’ (RTF) and almost everything you need to fly is included. It comes with a 6 channel 2.4Ghz programmable transmitter, spare parts. The only extra thing you need to get flying is a set of 8 AA batteries for the transmitter. It’s a full collective-pitch helicopter with an idle-up switch on the trasmitter.

The battery for the helicopter is included, it’s a single cell Li-Poly 400mAh battery which uses an ‘HMX’ style connector. I’ve not seen this type of connector before but it may be more common with little electric aircraft. The battery seems to take between 20-30 minutes to charge completely and you should charge it right out of the box.

The Novus CP  is tiny, if you look at it compared to my Mini-Titan 450, you can probably grasp how small it really is.  The Mini-Titan in itself is a smaller electric helicopter compared to nitro-methane powered or gasoline powered helis that I used to fly.

The setup is pretty clean. There’s a small brushed motor powering the main rotor, the head is controlled by three nano-sized servos in an eCCPM configuration, there are no complex linkages in this little guy.

The tail rotor uses an even smaller motor.  There’s no pitch control on the tail rotor as the motor just changes direction back and forth instead.

The receiver, motor speed control and gyro are built together into one module which sits at the front of the helicopter. When you power up the heli, it centers the gyro so you should do that on a flat surface to ensure the tail rotor operates properly.

There are additional ports for tail rotor output and main motor ESC output if you decide to upgrade it to a brushless system later. Heli-Max does sell a lot of upgrades for this such as brushless motors, and CNC machined head components if you like hop-ups or bling.

The helicopter flies pretty good in it’s stock configuration, you should tighten the blades a little bit or it will ‘orbit’ while you’re hovering and other things. Once you get it a couple of feet off the ground the flight stabilizes as you’re not flying through the rotor wash.

This helicopter is a bit more work to keep in the air than larger size helicopters but it’s not extremely twitchy like some other micro-sized helis I have flown. I would not recommend it as a first helicopter, it seems the smaller these things get, the more work they are to keep in the air.

The radio is also programmable as well, although it requires you to remove a cover, flip a switch and then use the two knobs on it’s face to set new values. Once you have set the new values, you turn the switch back.  This allows you to adjust the throttle and pitch curves, the hover throttle, exponential(affects all controls) and other things you would expect to find in a helicopter radio. I was somewhat surprised by all the features.  Additionally since this is a full CP (Collective-Pitch) helicopter the radio also has an Idle-Up switch which will allow you to do a lot of the inverted tricks and some level of 3D flying as well.

I don’t have a large enough indoor space at home to try any stunts or 3D type maneuvers with, but I will try it in the warehouse at work next week.

For the price this is a very good deal, considering it comes with programmable radio as well.  It also includes a spare set of rotor blades and a spare one-piece tail rotor in the box. The manual is fairly straight forward about repairing the helicopter and changing the settings as well.  There is a manual update on the Heli-Max site, which is in references to tightening the blades before flying.

However fun this is it is considered an older generation of model product, so you should not pay a premium price for it.

There are newer versions of this heli out  under the Walkera name, the original manufacturer, that can be had for a fair price with newer features, such as the dual brushless motors and other things included for pretty great prices. If you can get this kit as a reasonable discount I would recommend it.

It’s kind of weird around here, few of the immediate neighbors have put up lights. I’ve always been a big Christmas light fan.  They’re fairly easy to put up and take down and add a festive look to things.  Still to go are the 600 or so blue/white light string, plus the big RGB LED bulbs which color shift and do different things.  Those will go on a tree  in the left side yard this year.

I’m glad I went, we got a couple of flights in each in about an hour and a half’s time.  The field was deserted as is to be expected in the cold weather. There are very few ‘hardcore’ all weather fliers out there.  In past years I’ve flown in the middle of snow-storms with my friends. We took turn shooting video of each other flying. Ollie took his Cypher 3D 450 sized helicopter and I took my GP Reactor Bipe EP and my Mini-Titan 450 sized helicopter.

Ollie had these blue rubber gloves that he said helped keep your hands a bit warmer, while still allowing you to fly.  It was around 28F out, so I decided to give them a try.  They do work somewhat better than bare skin, so if you see ’smurf hands’ in the videos, that’s the deal there.

The Mini-Titan needs some more work, so I just packed it up rather than risking fate, but flew the GP Reactor Bipe a couple of times.

For people who can’t use the built in player you can see the videos of me Here and Ollie Here and for the rest you can view the videos below.

Then we froze and went home, the end!

I took a video a short while later, which you can see here via the link, or with the embeded player.

Snow!

It’s also quite unlikely that this will keep me from getting at least a few flights in on some kind of airplane, I’ll probably go out with the reactor biplane since it’s easy to setup and put away.

The flights on the GP Reactor Biplane were excellent, it has always flown really well since we built it (Bryn helped put it together) and aside from one minor mistake of mine on the first flight it’s been pretty reliable. I will note that grass is a bit tough on the landing gear and it’s possible you will rip the wheels off if the grass isn’t short, etc.  Below is a video of the Reactor. This flight was pretty boring overall, I did explore a bit more into low speed low altitude flight and other things later in the day and may add some more video of that.

We also took Bryn’s Sky Fly 2 up a couple of times, the stock charger was junk and hadn’t actually charged the batteries one bit. I charged them up on my Triton 2 and they worked alright, they may just need a little conditioning before they charge right on the included charger.  On the first flight we attached a tiny camera to the leading edge of the wing and recorder the flight, and Bryn recorded part of the flight from the ground, so there’s a nice Picture in Picture effect.  The elevator and rudder controls on the Sky Fly 2 are a bit weak by default because they are tuned down for beginners, but once it’s in the air it flies alright.   Here’s the video from the micro-cam and the HD camcorder on the ground. Check it out! That’s one of my flying buddies throwing the plane.

We also had a visit from a possibly ill groundhog.  Probably rabies or distemper or something. It just ran in circles continuously and was not afraid for it’s life from humans, etc.  So here’s the video of that.   Fortunately it did not seem like it wanted to eat my planes, so that was good.

The Twist 60 was misbehaving, with this design the tail feathers are just bolted onto the tail of the airplane, sort of like they do it with the large scale aircraft.  After a couple flights of porpoising it started to get pretty annoying but I thought maybe it was just controls or the center of gravity (CG) set improperly. On the third flight the plane stuffed into the tall unmowed grass twice before it even got off the ground, and then the engine wouldn’t start. I decided to call it quits for that plane for the day as a ’sign’.  Which is good.  As I was disassembling the Twist 60 I discovered that the horizontal stabilizer was actually loose in it’s saddle which was causing the elevator to move up and down as it shifted.  If I had flown it again it’s quite possible the horizontal stabilizer would have flown off of the plane, or at least cause a major control problem leading to a crash.  I have since epoxied the tail feathers onto the plane as I don’t need to remove them anytime in the forseable future.  Hopefully this next weekend will be good so I can try this routine again.

I do however have plenty of time to work on the front sidewalk and build a radio controlled airplane, go figure!  The plane is a good break from the rc helicopter.  I’ve been getting that back into flying shape too, but for some reason I have a lot of flutter on the rotor at high RPMs. I need to diagnose that this week sometime and figure out what is going on there.  The setup is the same as it was before, the only difference is the blades and a different radio.

Hobby Shops
First at the top of the list is the Twist 60. I went to Barn Speed Hobbies in Lee, Massachusetts which is about an hour each way.  I went for a mini-heli pitch gauge, but ended up buying a Hanagar 9 Twist 60 and a Saito 1.15 4-stroke nitro engine.  I also bought some high-torque servos which they said were pretty good for the price, and which turned out to be total junk.

Not much I can say about that but I’m doing a bit more mail order for the time being. I don’t mind dealing with local hobby shops, like J&J Hobbies in Kingston, Jan is pretty nice and good to me. What I don’t like is being told servo is decent by someone and having it turn out to be a big pile of junk TO THE EXTREME.  I guess if I had an iPhone I could have looked those things up, but it’s not worth the $100 or more a month for that thing.  I think it’s a great device, but the service rates are stupid pricey just to look like a hipster. I do have an iPod touch which I don’t bring out in public and show everyone, it just plays my music and runs a few necessary applications.

Servos
I bought the Twist 60 last week and after the bum servos  ( TowerPro MG995 ) which 3 out of 5 were defective I went and ordered some Hitec MG 5625MGs for a few bucks more a piece.  The torque wasn’t as high, but I knew they would have a better percentage of good to bad! While I’ve had good luck with the Hitec servos, maybe out of the last 10 I’ve ordered I had one defective.  I pulled apart the case on the defect and rebuilt it and it worked fin.   The TowerPro MG995’s were grindy and nasty with bad centering and weird operations.   I kept the TowerPros, I hear the amp board is good so I’m going to mod a bunch of S148’s over to digital just to be weird.

Twist 60 Plane
The Twist 60 went together pretty easy.  The tail feathers bolt on, and the rudder and elevator servos mount in the tail of the aircraft.  Best to have a couple 18″ and 9-12″ servo extensions for this model. The fuel tank was kind of lame because the hole in the firewall was cut bigger than the neck of the tank.  A little bit of silicone around the neck of the fuel tanks seals the gap and keeps fuel from spraying back along the tank and into your landing gear block/electronics section.

It’s a shame this plane has been discontinued but there are some hardcore people making short kits and that kind of thing if you look hard enough (hint: twistaholics on google)

It comes with the hardware to run as a nitro-methonal or electric aircraft.  As I planned to run it at nitro I did a couple of small modifications to it.  The biggest was that I sanded down the firewall and sidewalls of the engine compartment and coated them with 30 minute epoxy to seal it against fuel, I also painted the inside of the fuel tank compartment with epoxy in case any leaks develop.  Secondly I went through the fuse and epoxied critical joints in the fuse with a light coat of 30 minute epoxy to strengthen it a bit.  This required cutting the covering of the bottom lightening hole behind the canopy but I feel it was worthwhile from things I had read elsewhere.

Electronics
Radio: For the electronics I used an Aitronics SD-10G 2.4Ghz radio, I’ll have to write another post on this radio, it’s pretty awesome.  I used the 10 channel receiver.  It runs in FH3 modulation mode which causes some problems with analog servos so that’s why I used the Hitec 5625MG servos in all locations, including the throttle.

Regulator: For the power supply plane side I used a Outrage 2s/7.4v/2200mAh LiPo battery powering a Fromeco Arizona regulator.  The Arizona regulator is a helicopter regulator, but that just means it has 2 lower voltage outputs for the gyro in a heli.  I didn’t use those outputs in the setup.

Servos: As I mentioned I used the Hitec 5625MG servos.  They work well and seem sturdy and strong enough for this application.

Engine
When I bought the plane I bought a Saito 1.15 4-stroker along with it. This is my first 4-stroke nitro engine and it was not as difficult to setup as some people seem to make it out to be.  The documentation is very straight forward, and this engine didn’t seem to have any quirks or weird things leftover from production.  I ran about 1/3rd of a gallon through the engine on a test bench before sticking it on the plane.

I bought Byron 4-stroke fuel.  It’s 15% nitro and 16% oil. Saito recommends 20% oil so I bought some oil additive, also Byron brand and remixed the fuel up to 20%.  The Byron fuel has about 3% castor in it.  The original Saito manual says to run ‘mostly synthetic’ fuel, while the American sources say to run 100% synthetic.  I prefer to run a little castor in my mix, and I believe the original manufacturer knows what they are talking about.  Not everyone is a super-pro engine tuner who never has an accident.  Additionally, fuel system problems can cause lean conditions, and have a bit of castor in there makes me feel a LITTLE safer.  It may require more maintenance in the long run, but these engines are so simple that it’s not a problem to tear one down and clean it up!

First Flight

I took the first flight on this aircraft on Sunday the 15th(2009). The plane flew pretty great. I was expecting it to be a disaster but all I need was some down trim and it was great.  As you can see from the video it really wanted to go up!  Some of that was me of course, some of it the trim.  Together it made for a great first takeoff and that Saito yanked it right up into the sky with no problem at all.

I just puttered and played around a bit, adjusting trims and other things. I wanted to get a first flight in casually just to make sure everything was working as desired. Future flights will involve a lot more crazy as this plane is going to be great!  A friend shot some video of the flight as you can see here (if you can’t, the link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eLHxliTmDA )

The Sidewalk
Not nearly enough work has been done on the sidewalk.  I spent a weekend a while back building new front steps.  The new regulations/building codes require a different setup on the steps which means I needed to get them in place to really know where to put the sidewalk.  The steps have gone pretty good and just need some ballisters put on the sides and paint to be done.  I’ll psot some pictures up once I get the ballisters on and paint them to match the front porch.

Here is the most recent picture of the walk aka the kiddie pool during a recent rainstorm.  It’s important to remember to add proper drainage to your digging areas, or this happens.  There is a drain trench that leads to the roadside cliff edge, but it’s not deep enough.  If it were not for this drain trench, the excavation area would have been filled to the top.  This weekend I hope to get more material removed, it’s quite a piece of work for me because my body deteriorates quickly with heavy labor due to the rheumatoid arthritis, however I know we’ll get it done eventually, and most importantly before winter. The stairs will be getting removed and the sidewalk concrete will extend to the edge of the deck, then new steps will be built and secured to the concrete pad to make everything nice and solid.  The steps are in not-so great condition, though still strong but I think new steps will look great.

New sidewalk excavation

REACTOR BIPLANE

Aside from ditch digging we built a model biplane over the weekend and got some airtime on it.  The biplane is a Electrifly (Great Planes) ‘Reactor Bipe’.  It’s an electric biplane with a 38″ or so wingspan. I probably would have been better off buying some repair parts for the heli and a new radio but this looked really neat and hopefully it’ll help me blend in with the plane guys more at the R/C field.  The electric motor is a .15 equivilant size, theoretically, though I somewhat doubt it, it still does a pretty good job.

Electrifly Reactor Biplane

The Reactor Bipe was originally built with the suggest Futaba 3114 servos, but these tended to strip really easy and it got frustrating running out of servos.  I purchased some new gearsets for the servos, but they will be used in some other, lighter project because they just really don’t hold up in this application.  I replaced the servos with the Hitech HS-65MGs I was using in the Mini-Titan helicopter and things improved GREATLY, these servos really have the needed strength for the large control surfaces and are pretty fast as well.

The Reactor built pretty quickly, you do have to be careful about a few points. I noticed after assembly that using the pre-cut hinge slots that one ailerone was a bit lower than the one on the opposing wing.  Double check the position of the hinge slots and everything else if you are concerned.  Additionally where they recommend to use 30 minute epoxy, I’d definetly go that route.  The manual for the tail includes and update sheet to use CA to adhear the horizontal stab, rather than epoxy.  I suspect this is because epoxy could drip and cause the elevator tie rod thing to become bound.  Even with CA this is possible, be careful when applying the CA glue to the horizontal stab.  Additionally when gluing the control rods to the clevises, make sure the thin CA doesn’t drip into the joint.  It will adhere them solidly, and while you think that you escaped disaster because the arm and surface still moves, you’ll quickly discover that this is only because the clevis is slowly twisting itself apart, instead of actually rotating in the control horn.

The manual comes with recommended control throws for low rates, high rates, and 3d.  If you use the recommended control arm holes and low rates, you’ll find that the control is very grainy/low-resultion.  You have to turn the travel/ATV down so far, that you are only using a very small portion of the bandwidth for each channel, and you can actually see each step in the control surfaces.  This is bad because you loose a lot of precision.  I would recommend using the outer holes in the control horns on the control surfaces, and the inner holes on the servo control arms if you just want to start out easy.

I’ve put in 4 flights in the last two nights, all of them were great although the plane is pretty ‘touchy’ on the controls.  I will probably work in some exponential to make the middle of the controls softer, as I feel this would be okay for a plane (I don’t like expo on helis).

Electrifly Reactor Biplane Side View

Reactor Bipe Airborne

COPPER VAPOR LASER

Another side project which has been absorbing my time is the Copper Vapor Laser project. I’ve been building a tube furnace for this laser since the bore of the laser, where the copper vapor and helium (or neon) is energized by the electricity needs to be heated up to 800 degrees F for a copper chloride/bromide type solution.  While the tube furnace I am building is overkill as I actually wish to build a version of this laser using elemental copper.  The disadvantage of using elemental copper is that it requires extremely high temepratures, in the range of 1500 degrees celcuius (almost 2800 degrees Fahrenheit).  Because of this I have been lovingly crafting the furnace out of high temeperature ceramic fibers (Inswool), ceramic boards (Insboard) and a variety of refractory mortars.  For the bromide/chloride lasers, heat will be provided by a nichrome heater element(s) with no problem.  In order to reach operating temperature for the elemental copper vapor laser, I will probably use one or two propane torches inside of the cavity.

The bore for the CuCl/CuBr laser is a quartz tube, the bore for the elemental copper (Cu) laser will be a high temperature alumina ceramic bore.

The advantage of an elemental copper laser is that you do not require a double pulse power supply.  With a Cu Chloride or Bromide laser, you have to hit it once with a disassociation pulse, and a second time with the lasing pulse.  With elemental copper you don’t need to disassociate the copper from a bromide or chloride solution, so one step is saved there, at the cost of extreme temperatures.

Copper Vapor Lasers have been used in some of Pink Floyd’s shows, they produce powerful golden yellow and soothing green laser lines (beams).  Additionally CVL lasers have been used for the purpose of enriching uranium.  While I am a scientist at heart and love to explore all sorts of different realms, I don’t think that enriching uranium would be a recommended pastime, so I probably won’t explore that part of science!

Here are some pictures of the tube furnace in progress.  I’ve gotten much further, but don’t have pictures at this time. I will update my laser site later. This is the furnace for the CuCl/CuBr version of the laser.  For the elemental copper version of the laser, this will probably end up encased in an additional external Inswool blanket wrap to bring up the insulation value and retain more heat inside the core.

The plan is to lay out the general design of the sidewalk with string or spray paint, remove the existing blue stone that is there and start digging with the shovel and pick axe.  It’s going to be a lot of work because the ground as usual is pretty rocky.  As an added bonus the driveway used to go in front of the house.  When they decided to cover it up they didn’t remove the existing gravel, they just put a thin coat of topsoil on top of it.  this is why there is a driveway sized area across the front of the house and lawn where the grass barely grows at all and there are mostly broad leaf weeds, even after trying to kill them in the spring and planting new seed.  It looks terrible and will be partially resolved in September once the weather cools back down and I can plant more grass seed.

I’ll post some progress pictures of the work tomorrow afternoon, hopefully there will be some progress. I want to have a concrete sidewalk in soon, particularly while it’s still good concrete weather.  It’s impossible to run the snow-blower over the blue stone pieces that are/were there without shreading the lawn.  Someone came and picked up some of the blue stone already and I guess the rest will just go into the pile in the back.

The Arduino IDE is pretty flexible and easy to build with and it includes a built in serial monitor so you can send reports back from your little project. Additionally there are quite a few example projects and a reasonable resource base on the internet for finding out most anything you need to do whatever you might want to do.

My project is pretty generic, it’s a simple lighting system with LEDs. I chose the MegaBrite, ShiftBrite and OctoBrites because they’re already built and they’re pretty easy to program.  They use a bit-shift register so in order to send data to 20 of them, you just stream out 20 sets of data to the set and there you go.  There’s libraries for them so you don’t have to do all the bit shifting yourself.  You basically just need to send the data to an array for LED position and RGB values (0 – 1023) and your set.  I was very happy with how easy this was to setup, and the guy over at MaceTech has been very helpful with some non-common questions I had.   The MegaBrite modules were around $10 each, the ShiftBrite around $5, and the OctoBrites a bit more expensive at $24.   The arduino itself only cost $29.95!!

You can’t beat a deal like that, $29.95 for a completely programmable microcontroller development set, ready to plug and play (you could beat it if you built the programmer and other circuitry yourself, but.. I like things ‘ready to go’.)

I wanted to be able to control these LEDs via a serial port, and I’m a terrible computer programmer type, however I’m most familiar with PHP/MYSQL, etc.   I originally downloaded the NetBeans IDE for Java and tried to write a Java control program. Trying to do serial communications in Java is a bit of a nightmare, because most of the libraries are old, unsupported or broken.  Though there may be one way to do serial for Java pretty easily, I’ll cover that next.

I gave up on Java after a DAY of trying to find a working serial library.  I resorted back to PHP to see what could be done there.  I downloaded XAMPP from Apache Friends which is a complete web server, php, mysql, etc solution.  Everything you need to experiment with PHP on your PC without installing Linux and other things. I had originally tried the php_serial class.  It didn’t work, period and also there are some possible coding deficiencies discovered after reading various message boards.  It is a good library to use if you want to communicate in Linux, but I wouldn’t recommend it for window.

After a bit more search I found some references to SerProxy, it’s basically a proxy server that works as an interface between your Windows serial ports and any programming language which can do TCP/IP network communications. There are pre-compiled windows versions available or you can compile it yourself. I found a few examples online and within minutes had my PHP application sending the control codes to the Arduino code I had written.  It’s so much faster than php_serial seemed to be (long delays). It didn’t cost anything and it also supports 2 way connections in PHP under Windows, something that the php_serial class did not provide.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time playing with this little project of mine, as well as I am busy working on building a copper vapor laser.  You can keep up to date with my laser projects over at my laser blog .  Quite a few things to distract me from working on the house and such.  This weekend though we will be working on digging out the base for the new concrete front sidewalk and I will be posting pictures and information about that so stay tuned!

On the weather front things seem to be heating up quite a bit this week, but still those continuous thunderstorms. I can’t quite think of any time in the past years that I’ve lived in NY that we’ve gotten storms day after day. It reminds me of when I was down in florida, they had a big storm everyday, then the sun would come right back out and everything would be sunny and muggy/humid.  I think it’s supposed to be mid to upper 80’s, I was reading that my family in the NE may be getting close to 100. So hot!!!  Glad that Mom at least has an air conditioner to help her out. Though I’d trade my air conditioner if we could just get rid of the humidity here!

We put the air conditioner in the window a couple of weekends ago, it was kind of a pain in the neck because of some missing screws for the side covers of the air conditioner. In my last apartment the windows slide left to right so I didn’t need them, and promptly lost the little screws. So of course the local hardware store didn’t have anything like them in stock.  As usual every 30 minute project turns into a 3 hour ordeal.

The lawns are coming along okay. The problem with the peninsula lawn still exists, the soil is still to sandy and the nutrients wash out of it quickly and I’m sure the water probably leaches out pretty quick too, even with all that peat moss we tilled in.

If I don’t tear the lawn out and redo it again, it’s going to have to be fertilized once every 3-4 weeks to keep it growing. Otherwise it screeches to a halt and gets a little unhealthy looking. Once it’s fertilized it perks right back up and has normal growth.  Tearing it out, again would mean getting a sod cutter, cutting out all the grass and rolling it up somewhere (if we were to try and reuse it, I’d rather replant) then a) tilling in a bunch of good quality topsoil into the sand to bring it to some kind of a ‘normal’ soil level or b) removing a bunch of the topsand.. err soil and replacing it completely with new good quality topsoil which wouldn’t be cheap either and would probably require renting a BobCat for a weekend (fun, but expensive as well).

Hmm decisions decisions

I may need to do some long term data graphing of the line feed from the pole and see if we experience a lot of power sags around here.

I will probably spend some time on it this weekend as I can imagine it adds quite a bit to the power bill.  Some things I’ve already checked are for a water pump from the old well being turned on due to a pressure switch, but a brief look around notes that the old well lines have been cut, and no water comes spewing out of the pump lines when water is turned on.  Now I know you should decommission a well when it’s not in use, but that will come in due time.  The previous owners quit using the well years ago before I bought the place and never decommissioned it (lucky me). I want to wrap the deck around where the old well cap is but the cap needs to be removed first.  Another thing on the large list of ‘to do’s’ in an old home. EPA, if I was wealthy it’d be fixed already, I’m more than willing to accept a grant to decommission my well though!

I’ll let you folks know what I find out by the end of the weekend, if anything.  I’ll just update this post, instead of posting another.

My first test is going to be flushing the toilet about 10-20 times (takes forever for hot water to make it to the second floor) and see if the tank on the back starts filling with warm water. Problem solved, if that’s the case. Well.. problem found, still needs to be solved!

I read there is also something called a mixing / anti-condensation valve which is sometimes used for toilets, it’s possible one of these is installed somewhere and has gone bad and is flowing all hot water instead of mixing. The basic premise is that some hot water is mixed into your cold water line to keep your toilet’s tank water from getting too cold and causing moisture to condense on the outside of the commode.  Considering how long it takes hot water to reach the second floor, actually having a valve like this installed in the system would be a joke and a waste.

The advantage of fixing this is it will save on the power bills, if it truly is the hot water heater kicking on. My current electric bill is around 130 a month for a 1700 Sq Ft home with no central A/C, that seems a bit on the high side to me. I pretty much had the same equipment running in my apt and I was averaging 60-80 a month in the summer.

Here are a few photos of these.  Actually quite a few, they’re so neat in a lot of different ways. The resolution has been reduce to 1024×768 to make them viewable on the page, but if you’d like a higher resolution copy (8 megapixel) of these photos please use the contact links located at various places on the page (top and sides).

The flowers are orange/red, form out of a pod, and grow at the end of long green vines.  They pop open and their little antennae thingies poke out waiting for the bees and what not to do their job.  At any rate, please enjoy the photos and let me know if you have any ideas for creating copies of these and helping them multiply.

Turn the PatchMaster a new part of your lawn as soon as possible because the chances are the rest of your lawn may look terrible compared to the patch.  Before you know it you will want to patch your whole lawn so it looks as good as the patched spot. I know this sounds terribly adversity, but I’m not paid by nor endorsed by Scott’s to promote their lawn.  My true feelings is that a) the mulch material (paper) could be better filtered for plastics and other things b) if it’s watered it really does grow up quickly c) it usually looks better than the rest of your lawn and c) money well spent, so far!

YOU HAVE TO KEEP IT WET! this is critical or your PatchMaster will fail.  Additionally, you have to have good loose soil for the roots to grow in.  Heavy clay soil, or heavy rock soil may pose a problem to you. If you have either of those I recommend getting a pick axe and shovel and breaking up your soil (watch for water/sewer lines, check your basement for where they exit and use COMMON SENSE).  Remove rocky/nasty soil or screen it to get rid of the rocks and debris and add sand/composted manure/topsoil if needed to turn it into decent soil. There are numerous sites dedicated to improving the condition of your soil, I have not written about that as of yet.

In the area in the photos below I added new topsoil to fill in a hole in the lawn. The soil is untreated with chemicals and all natural. It worked out great and I’m sure you can find similar materials local to you or make them from stuff from the local garden shop, Lowe’s, or Home Depot.

Anyway, enough from me, here are the photos of Scott’s PatchMaster at 63 days, slighty over 2 months.