The Vigoro 3015V sprinkler timer is a single-zone outdoor unit which connects directly to your outdoor hose lines and has an option for a remote water sensor unit which is attached to a receiver.  The case is glued, or more likely ultrasonically welded closed around the internal components.

If you want to see large versions of these images just click on the image in the page you can use the << and >> button at the bottom of the image viewer to move between photos.

The first step in opening the case is to pull out my trusty craftsman moto-tool and cut carefully through the seam of the box. I wore safety glasses for this as hot plastic gets thrown all over the place.

I didn’t want to cut through the valves or through the plug for the water sensor receiver antenna, so I used a screwdriver just to pop the remaining edges of the seams.  It came apart pretty easily.

With that done we can now see the internals of the Vigoro 3015V sprinkler timer and get an idea for how they do things.  I’ve labeled the different components inside of the housing. You can see the battery terminals, Rain Sensor Antenna connector (mislabeled as ‘temp sensor’, the water valve and in the bottom of the shell you can see the ‘potted’ electronics section with the battery terminals going into it. The potting materials are usually an epoxy type material which is designed to completely seal the electronics and protect them from any moisture damage.

I disconnected the valve assembly for a closer look as seen in this next picture on the right hand side. The valve has a long barrel section which looks something like a rifle scope, and attached to the left hand side with the red and black wires is the drive motor and gearing.

Here’s a side view of the valve. You can see the drive motor a bit more clearly as well as the one of the gears that it moves. The gearing moves a pin in and out of the valve housing to start and stop the flow of water.

This picture below is the top view of the valve labeled and colored to show the high and low pressure side.  The high pressure side from the water inlet comes in from the right and co-axially surrounds the low pressure section which goes to the outlet.

I removed the motor from the valve and you can see a bunch more labels. Of note you can see the high and low pressure taps, and the return spring in the middle. When the pin slides out it connects the high pressure from the high pressure tap to the low pressure tap, causing the main high pressure to compress the spring and open the valve. A more detailed pictorial sequence is further down in this post.

This is the main valve drive motor for the Vigoro 3015V sprinkler timer. It consists of a small DC motor and a gear drive with a cam on it. as the motor rotates (rather quickly) it presses the pin in, or pulls the pin out.  When the pin is extended the pressure behind the valve diaphragm equalizes and the spring forces the diaphragm closed. When the pin slides out, the opposite happens.

Below is the valve body with the diaphragm removed. If you look at a large version of the photo you can see how there is an outer cavity where the high pressure water comes in from your home and then an inner cavity which is the low pressure/outlet side of the valve.

In the next 3 images you can see a diagram I drew of the valve in the Vigoro 3015V.  This is the sequence of the valve opening.  Closing the valve works in reverse.

I hope this helps anyone who was curious about how these valves work. There is a gate, but it’s very small and basically acts as a hydraulic switch to operate a larger hydraulically operated valve. It’s kind of neat for me as I’ve always wondered how these things work, and it took me a little bit to figure out how the thing worked. I was expecting to see a large gate with a motor that open and closed it.  I think the Orbit valves may work like this, and I am going to be dis-assembling one of my spare valves from my Orbit Sprinkler Timer at some point this week.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments or corrections by filling in the comment form at the bottom of the page.

Upon checking my stats a while back I noticed that I was getting more visitors via mobile devices. While the numbers aren’t huge I thought it would probably be a good idea to provide a streamlined experience for those viewers that would allow them fast and direct access to this site and the articles within.

About a month ago I started working with mobile sites/css/etc to try and provide some mobile services for one of my personal project sites I have been working on.  That turned out to be an incredibly huge amount of work, especially for someone like me who doesn’t do a lot of layout coding.  While most phones will render regularly formatted web pages nicely, it’s important provide a format specifically for mobile devices.  Big buttons, readable text, minimal multi-touch zooming required, intelligent interface, etc.

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time preparing a mobile theme but you also want something that is flexible to your needs you may wish to consider WPtouch.  You can do a search in the WordPress plug-ins or you can go their website to download the free 1.9 version of the plugin, or the WPtouch-Pro version from their website.

WPtouch basically takes your WordPress blog and pulls all the content apart on the fly and re-organizes it with a fresh new layout which is most at home on mobile phones.  While your computer based web users will continue to see your normal site template, users with smart phones will get a page which looks very at home on the portable device.

The basic interface of WPtouch-Pro was very easy to set up.  It lets you define all off the basic layout options including the icons used for various sections in the site. It comes with a large number of icons, and if you don’t like any of those you can add your own.  If you don’t like the template you can also create you own, or use one of the existing two.   The folks at BraveNewCode say that they will be adding new template designs shortly, and anyone who has registered for the 2.x version will get a free upgrade throughout the 2.x revision series to the newest plugin and the latest themes they have developed.

The WPtouch plugin is available for free on the WordPress plugin directory, but there is a newer 2.0 version out, WPtouch Pro that is $29 dollars per site or $59  (CAN) for a 5 site license.  Their plugin supports ‘web site as an app’ functionality in Safari and lots of other cool stuff such as themes, drop down menus, ajax enhanced interface, custom WPtouch-Pro  management interface panel, custom icons and it just goes on.  Check out their site for more info, I think you’ll like it.They also provide full commercial support for their product.

Check out http://www.thaltech.com/houseblog on your mobile phone to see how it looks or just scan the following QR code on your device.   Please post a comment and let me know what you think, I’d appreciate it!

A WHAT CODE? A QR Code is a kind of bar code that rather than just being a bunch of variable width lines like | || |||| | || like you see on packages and on your mail, known as one dimensional, each dot on a QR represents a bit of data and it reads across and up and down.  QR codes can be used to store URL’s (like above), text, small pictures, map info, contact info, etc.   You can make your own QR Codes if you do a search for “QR Code Generator“.

To read a QR code you need a code reading application and a phone/computer with a camera.  There is a lot of different software out there.   For the Android the one I prefer is Barcode Scanner v3.4 . This is a basic bar code scanner that will let you search product IDs online (for price comparison while you shop) and of course read QR codes and go directly to the web page.

You will have to do a search if you have an iPhone, BlackBerry or other device. Usually just going to your app market you can search for ‘barcode’ and get a lot of results.

Having so much wing area is a huge bonus when flying FPV because it really slows things down and when you are just gliding your video is so smooth.  With the addition of some moderate piloting skills you can get some awesome results and a ton of enjoyment.

The first video I have to show you today is the test video. I always fly a plane in ‘normal’ line-of-sight mode with all of the FPV gear, receiver, video recorded and goggles running but I let a friend wear the goggles while I fly the plane.  If there are any interference issues they can tell me if there is a problem and I can go back and review the video later to see what is going on. Bryn wore the goggles for the first flight, I don’t think he’s worn them before and he really enjoyed the view as I flew around. I think it’s a view that everyone into R/C should get to experience.

Here’s a hard link to the video on YouTube (where you can vote and comment ): Spirit 100 Glider FPV-First Person View Setup Test Flight or you can watch it with the embedded player.

Once the test flight had been performed and I received good reports from my goggled co-pilot, Bryn, I proceeded to get some batteries charged up for the next flight, which was to be a true FPV flight.   My buddy Ollie spent some time flying his discus glider while my batteries charged up.  He built this thing from scratch and it flies great.  It is amazing to watch him spin around and throw this thing a hundred feet in the air. Check out the gallery then scroll down for more FPV testing!

I hope you had fun checking out those photos. After quite a few launches, flights and catches of OT’s DLG (Discus Launch Glider) my batteries were finally charged and I was ready to do my first real FPV flight on the SPirit 100 (2.6 meter) powered glider.  The first launch from FPV ever was pretty rough, I did not power on the motor soon enough and/or did not pull back and time and the glider left a nifty divot in the field.  After checking things over and the glider (seemingly) looking okay Ollie threw it up again and this time it took.

Now, I had reset the camera to default settings because I wanted to go through it and demo all of it’s options, a project I still need to get to, but having forgot this, the camera was doing very poorly with the low level of lighting.  Everytime I lifted the center of the camera to the horizon, it blacked out the video, and when I pointed it down everything lit back up.  This was very difficult to fly with as I kept getting ‘blacked out’ and I finally decided to land it.  I did get a good 2 and 1/2 minutes of flight time, and that 2.5 minutes was great. I really look forward to getting some full flights in!

Here’s the second video, again here is the hard link in case you want to comment and vote: First FPV Flight on Spirit 100 Glider or you can watch the embedded version below.

After the flight I found out that the root of one of the wing sections had been broken at the rear mounting point. I think the sudden deceleration caused the wingtips to move forward under inertia and the rear mounting points to pull forward and shear out of the wing-bolt block. the 1/4-20 screws seemed no more worse for that wear though.  I’m going to strip the covering from this part of the wing and fiberglass it, at the suggestion of Ollie, and it should be all good to go again.

Also another problem discovered is that the motor I used for the power-pod on the Spirit 100 has a bent shaft which is causing excessive vibration when I power up the motor. If you watch the videos you can see the video ‘wiggling’ occasionally, this is the cause.   I’m ordering a new shaft and bearings for this motor this week (probably Boca Bearing ceramics) since I also need to order a new shaft, bearing and prop-adapter set for my Twist 60′s Power 90 motor.  I’ll try to get some shots of those two motor repairs in case anyone is interested in ‘how to replace bearings and motor shafts’

Thanks for watching!

I started watching in hopes that it would be pretty interesting.  Phil didn’t waste any time, within the first 5 minutes he had already shown us 7500 pounds of ANFO (Ammonium-Nitrate-Fuel-Oil), an explosive mixture. This quantity is apparently equivalent to 3000 pounds of TNT.  Then right to some slow motion shots of bullets with scientific descriptions of things.  That’s a great way to start a show, for me. There are some other great experiments in the show that should be interesting for a variety of folks.

I used to occasionally read a website called badastronomy.com  at some point Phil Plait moved the site to Discovery Blogs. I remember the site before it was a Discovery Blog, so it must have been a while since I visited.  The old site can be found using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine  as linked here Wayback Machine: Bad Astronomy

This has been a pretty fun show overall, I recommend trying to catch it on Discovery if you can! It shows again tonight at 1AM Eastern, 12 Centeral, 11 Mountain and 10 Pacific.

About a month ago I was flying a bit late and lost orientation of the heli and put it in. You’ll probably see lights on the heli here and there in the video, but I’ll make another post on those. The lights do help a lot when the sun goes down and it’s hard to get perspective.

The video below shows my progress with inverted hovering over four flights.  I have practiced this only for about 10 minutes on my Phoenix R/C flight simulator, but the sim just never feels right compared to the real thing, so I just decided to practice with the real thing.  The first and second flights are pretty rough but you can see a slow improvement over the duration of the video clip.  My goal is to be able to hover a complete flight (4:30 minutes) inverted.

My accumulated RC heli experience before attempting this is quite a few years of semi-sedate stuff. I’m competent with hovering, fast forward flight. I’m comfortable flipping the heli forwards and backwards, as well as side to side. I’ve rolled the heli while pulling up into a vertical climb (kind of like a stall climb with a plane) and while not totally comfortable with it I can hover nose in alright.

Last week I spent about an hour practicing inverted blow-outs where I flipped the heli and hammered negative collective to push the heli up into the air to try and get a feel for the collective when inverted and the responsiveness, as well as trying to remember the right way to punch the collective when inverted.

Overall I would say in less than 20 minutes of flying (4:30 minutes x 4 flights) I’ve made quite an improvement on inverted hovering.  There is plenty of room for improvement of course, but I think at this rate it will come quickly. The biggest part of learning new skills when flying models, and in fact doing most things is to find the time to put into actually flying or doing those things.

Once I get good at hovering inverted nose in, then I will spend some time working on hover inverted nose out as well.  Hopefully in a couple of months I’ll feel comfortable in all positions of upright and inverted.

The video is uploading right now, and I’m about to go test out my new FPV Glider. I’ve set this post to auto-post at about the time the video is complete.

Update: The video is here or embedded below

Feel free to share below if you’ve recently been trying out some new moves with your RC heli or airplane.

According to his claims, and he may be right, Paul Allen patented all the technologies currently used to deliver content to the world these days.  He has filed a lawsuit against (in alphabetical order) AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook,  Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo! and YouTube!

Apparently Paul Allen has several patents involving the delivery of content sensitive advertising and delivery of relative information when a viewer is on a website (does my ‘related posts’ count!?) and is suing for an unspecified amount from the companies.

This guy is currently worth 13+ Billion (muahaha) dollars!! I guess perhaps that 13 billion isn’t enough… as an example of what 13 billion dollars can buy a  nerd like me:

710,770,913.08 * thaltech.com Adsense income Aug-2010

434,056,761.27 Arduino Duemilanove Development Boards from SparkFun Electronics (SFE)

732,394,366.2 Turnigy 2200mAh Nano-Tech 11.1v Lithium Polymer Batteries with 5C Charge Rate! (HK)

13,829,934.36 Furion 6 R/C Helicopters by Miniature Aircraft via Heli-Proz (HP) (Talk about learning through experience!)

5,001,923.82 Copies of Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection from (Adobe) ..Holy crap that’s expensive, it can even make a rich guy look poor!

1,300 Bebos (2010)

15.29 Bebos (2008)

7.88 YouTubes (Google)

2.45 2008 Presidential Elections (WSJ)

Good news though.(?) He recently pledged to donate half of his wealth (and every other major corporations?) wealth to philanthropic causes when William Gates (of Microsoft fame) challenged the world’s billionaires to do the same.

Take this as you will folks, good, bad or indifferent, I won’t judge ya   More info at Engadget

Generally one should avert their eyes and look the other way while clicking the “DELETE SPAM” button.  There’s a great plug-in for Word-press called Askimet which uses other people’s spam reports and other spam recognition techniques to automatically detect and offer the option to delete spam from peoples comment histories before they show up on their blog.  My average is about 11billionty spams per 1 real comment so I’ll occasionally read through the spams to keep myself entertained while waiting for well educated responses from my select viewers.

In addition to the ‘May I Sex You Up’ messages, as one might suspect, there are numerous comments making reference to an impossibly small appendage one might be in possession of and the need for their self aggrandizing expander potions.  Of course, those all go by the wayside.  Then there are messages that perhaps one’s true loves physical attributes are not satisfactory to the other and that I may need to order them special magic voodoo potions in order to help them…. This would be quite disturbing, honestly, but it can be fun to read the broken English and the poor attempts at writing good blog spam messages.  I would like to offer my skills at a semi-experience english speaker to all of those blog spammers. I can write good worded englishness to better salesman your productions to the americano pig dogs.

THEN… holy smokes!  I came across this picture, and I can only assume that this is the byproduct of one of these sex-um-up garbage ads.  I had to take a second look at it.  At first I thought that perhaps these pump-it-up blast your bits super-collider of love chemical potions they were selling online might possibly work.  I mean.. when you see the picture, you’ll think to yourself.  HOLY COW!! Look what that did for the female of the species!  That’s unheard of!

Anyways, I’d advise you stay away from these potions you see advertised online.  Even if you need them, it’s unlikely that some doctor who’s name you can’t explain, emailing you or posting to your blog can really help you. As always, we (I) here at thaltech.com/houseblog recommend you see a board certified doctor before you go buying blue colored arsenic or some such on the web.  If you don’t, you could end up with THIS problem!

Yeah!! how embarrassing would that be!? He’s staring off, looking a little ticked off.. She’s looking the other way, and the little baby -WHATEVER- is like ‘uhm…… mom?’  Sure.. it’s got a long neck but you just can’t pass that off as ‘the kid’s a little weird’!

P.S.  If you’re offended by 2 giraffes with a feathered giraffe offspring, get a life, it’s 2010!

By the way, I found this image at  http://www.wildlife-pictures-online.com/giraffe_tala-09.html which may or may not have additional pictures of the side affects of on-line drug purchases!

And thanks Google for the appropriate linkage

There’s a little surprise at the end of the video, but I suggest you watch the whole video to get an idea of the brightness of this LED.

The LED was powered from a 7.2 volt battery pack directly with no ballast resistor for the LED.  I slightly discharged the pack from it’s peak voltage, however according to the Luxeon Star V Datasheet

Hard Link to Video

Hard Link to Li-Poly Fire

I spent some time this weekend working on the glider to do the final conversions steps for First Person View flying use.  I ditched the old canopy, it was almost 100 grams by itself and while it looked nice, the plastic pilot, plastic lid and canopy frame were getting in the way of mounting equipment and they were old and starting to crack. I made a new canopy for the glider out of some 3/32″ balsa and 3/16″ balsa.

The new canopy only weighs around 60 grams so I saved a little weight there which is an important consideration when it comes time to balance the whole plane out again. I’ll be removing the lead weights in the nose which will gain me 136 grams, and by replacing the canopy I saved another 40 grams, so that gives me about 176- so far on the conversion (not counting the addition of the FPV equipment).

In the fuselage itself I built a platform above the elevator and rudder servo to support the Eagle Tree eLogger v3 and the OSD Pro, a servo line runs up to the front of the fuse which is the video line and the camera mount is secured to the nose of the aircraft.  I also made a bay that the battery will fit in, and a smaller platform up front for the GPS.  I am going to mount the barometric altimeter on the underside of the new canopy so that the numbers show through from the top and I may consider trying the barometric airspeed sensor with pitot tube on this model as well.

The *Brite modules are generally setup to receive the shifted data from the SPI I/O port. This leads to good performance and fast updates since they are being hardware driven. Unfortunately I needed those pins for an older project I was working on which used the ShiftBrite shield and an Ethernet shield so I had rewired the ShiftBrite Shield to use other pins so the Ethernet shield could use the hardware SPI.  The owner over at Macetech helped me build a bit-banging interface to do the SPI I/O to the ShiftBrites via software.  The AtmoLight Clone project uses the stock Macetech code which made it easy to replace with my modified ShiftBrite driver code.  This different code is slower on the output, but it’s not noticeable on a small number of ShiftBrites with limited data.

I mounted the ShiftBrite modules onto the back of my primary 21″ monitor.  I have 2 ShiftBrite modules which point upwards, 2 to the left, 2 pointing down and 2 to the right with one MegaBrite module pointing straight back in the center for the summary channel.

Once your hardware and software on the Arduino you need to interface it to your computer.  The Atmo interfaces connect through the Serial/Com port at 38400 baud.  If your computer supports the USB com port of the Arduino, you should be able to connect to it.  Make sure in the setup section of your code that you only have one serial start statement, and that it’s set for 38400.

I tried two different ways to get the data to the Arduino.  The first was to use an older version of VideoLan/VLC Player.  The current version of VLC (as of 8/21/2010) does not seem have the built-in Atmo output code. If you’re putting something like this together, check to see if the new versions have it, the author of the VLC Atmo module said on another forum that he was working to get the Built-In Atmo code back into the package.

The Atmo plugin for VLC works very well, capturing average colors from the top, bottom, left, right and middle portions of the video it’s playing (as seen in the screen shot below from AtmoWin) and outputting that color information to the Arduino/ShiftBrite LED modules. It’s pretty quick and there are a lot of options which you can set to vary how quickly the lights respond, if they fade slowly or if they adapt quickly to the video input.  You can adjust the white balance of your modules, set a color for the LEDs to fade to in case you pause the video, and set a color that the LEDs will display once the video is complete.

The second option I tried is AtmoWin, which is for Windows only and in German. It takes a few minutes to figure out what all the stuff stands for, and Google translate may be helpful as well. I believe this software is written by the guy in the main project page.  This software runs in your system tray and has several output modes such as Atmo-Classic, Dummy(shows what the program is sampling), DMX, Null Device, Multi-Atmo (run up to 4 Atmo devices on 4 Com ports) and MondoLight.  The software captures the entire screen and is not limited to just a video window.  It does the same 5 point capture pattern, but of whatever you have showing in your desktop.  You can set the capture framerate (it defaults to 25).  The response time for this software seems very quick on my computer. AtmoWin also supports multiple monitors and you can choose which monitor the system will capture.

One thing to note is that when running some games in full screen mode it cannot capture the colors.  I ran Battlefield: Bad Company 2 in a full screen -window- however and it worked fine, adding some great effects to my gaming sessions!

This is the link to the main project page which provided me the information to build my own setup, make sure to check it out after watching my video below.

Fun3′s Blogspot Page – AtmoLight Clone

Arduino with Shiftbrites with AtmoWinX – Link to the YouTube video below in case the embedded player doesn’t work for you.

I built the power-pod out of some 3/8″ light ply.  The main tower section is laminated 1/4″ ply to achieve a total 3/4″ ply or something like that. I used the Gorilla Glue urethane stuff for the lamination.  Then I laminated on the 2×3/8ths some smaller pieces shaped to the wing, using a Dremel to shape everything out.  It turned out good! I aimed for about 3-5 degrees inclination on the power pod, but it still noses down a bit when power is applied. I’m going to add a couple of spacers under the front of the mount to add a few degrees and see how that goes.

I flew this plane 3-4 times on the tests, but I forgot to blue loctite the screws.  That’s a bit of a mistake, the plane started up with the vibes in the 3rd/4th flight and I landed it early. Always remember to loctite your metal to metal fasteners or things might fall off in flight. It could have gotten pretty ugly.

Now, onto the video. Enjoy!

Well! That was fun   Now it’s time to pick a new FPV aircraft.  I like the larger balsa planes. They have plenty of lift, power and the capability of carrying excess payload without suffering too much. Of course using a built up model for FPV means that crashing your plane generally causes damage that takes a bit more time to repair, etc. but that’s how it goes. There always seems to be a trade-off.

And now I present: The Great Planes Spirit 100 a 100″ wingspan glider kit manufactured by Great Planes.   There are two versions of this plane, the built up model that comes in the puzzle box, requires assembly, sanding, covering and finishing and the other is an ARF (Almost Ready to Fly) with a fiberglass fuselage. The non-ARF form of this model was thrust into my possession about a month ago at a local club meet.  People were apparently giving away planes that they didn’t want/need/plane to use so I got this.  It turns out the guy I got it from had purchased it as part of a larger collection but never flew it so now it makes it into my hands, no assembly needed.

As I mentioned the model has a 100″ wingspan, I can’t even fit the wing standing upright in my living room. There’s 3 servos in the wing, 2 for aileron and 1 controls the flaps. I had some HS-65MGs from the Reactor Bipe so I used those on the ailerons and I had an old wing servo, now missing it’s label (I think it is a Futaba) which I used for the flaps. I used normal sized servos for the elevator and rudder. A high torque Hitec for the elevator and a Futaba 3009 for the rudder.

The receiver is a Spektrum AR7000 with the satellite receiver.  I’ve had bad experience with my Airtronics 2.4 Ghz radio in FPV aircraft so I stick to the Spektrum for that purpose. Which is unfortunate, the Airtronics SD-10G is an awesome glider radio!

The Spirit 100 was originally set up for a hi-start type launching system but this isn’t quite my speed so on Friday and Saturday I built a ‘power pod’ for the glider.  I used the brushless motor from the Reactor Biplane and using some light ply I assembled a pod that sits atop of the wing. You can see the pod in the photos below.  The glider has plenty of room inside of the fuselage for an ESC (Electronic Speed Controller) and the Li-Poly battery which powers the motor.  Now I’ll be able to launch the glider by turning on the motor and throwing it rather than messing around with 200 feet of rubber surgical tubing as a giant rubber band!  The motor, mount, ESC and battery does add weight to the plane of course but not too much. As it was the plane had 160 grams of lead weight in the nose as this particular model always comes out tail heavy.

If the plane tests successfully without the FPV equipment I will mount all of the FPV equipment into the canopy and do some FPV gliding with it and the prop won’t interfere with the camera either.  It should be nice, IF all goes well

Here are a few photo’s of the Spirit 100 in my living room, hopefully this week I will have some photos of the plane assembled and possibly some flight video. This thing should float, though I don’t know if it will be able to thermal with the extra weight.

I’m looking forward to the fiber optic linking systems Intel is working on. I remember way back when when I was building my first laser in.. well, it was a while ago, it was a Heathkit voice communications laser kit(!). I remember thinking this would be cool to have fiber or something to link the two points so they wouldn’t have to be LOS (Line-of-Sight).  Then when I was dealing with trying to wrangle in old IDE cables into a case with a lot of drives, or worse yet SCSI arrays back in the day, I thought things would be a lot easier with a fiber connector instead of friggin wires. And why not, fiber technology was pretty advanced, even back then!

It appears, though, that they seem to be coming out with new standards that are grandfathering their existing technology and standards before they are even released.   As an example they just announced the Intel 50-Gbit/sec optical interconnect using their ‘silicon photonics’ technology which basically means the optical cables are directly attached to the chip, rather than the chip driving an output module which the fiber connects to. Just previously they were bragging about their 8-15-Gbit optical interconnect I guess this is similar to handling device I/O right on the processor rather than having an outboard I/O chip.

I think this type of technology will first lead to fiber optic connections that replace SATA, then instead of PCI Express, we’ll have our super-computers in a card (video processors) plugging into the motherboard for stability, some power, and the main connection will be a fiber link. Once we get past that stage you’ll start to see motherboards with fiber optics onboard and with optical ports between the processor and expansion cards.  You’re socket whatever will become a socket whatever/O There will still be pin connectors in the socket, but you’ll also have optical I/O channels.  The lasers will fire out the bottom of the processor and into the optical I/O ports built into the socket using micro-lensing technology and be distributed throughout the board.

Eventually your processor will just have a couple of bulky lugs for power and begin to resemble a really high-tech laser diode pump source. A couple of big lugs clamped down with the CPU and just a bunch of fiber optics integrated into the motherboard.  This technology isn’t that advanced over what we have today, but I’ve not seen anyone who has fiber optics integrated into their circuit boards (as in a fiber running like a circuit trace) if you have, please comment and share.

The peripherals will still be primarily passing electronics between components still, but eventually they’ll begin to become more optical themselves to take advantage of the optical processing capabilities of the primary processor itself.  The processor will advance ahead of the peripherals. By the time you have a fully optical processor, I suspect your accessories will still be using older electronics, but slowly catching up slightly out of phase on the development time-line.

So.. anyways! We’re like 10 years behind the curve on this stuff, get with it already! There’s tons of smart people on this, it’s just taking forever to roll out the new stuff.  In the last 100 years we’ve learned to fly, gone to the moon, invented nuclear technology, invented computing and about a million other substantial things. I’d like to see a primarily optical computer developed in my lifetime and in consumer hands since I missed everything else!

Ah where was I? Oh right, digital audio optical cables longer than 15 feet.. What’s the deal?

Fridays are half day for me and it feels like we worked all day on some of these projects. We’ve been slowly scraping and priming the back side of the house. The paint on the house is not that old but was not applied very well and it’s starting to peel and chip, additionally there are cracks between the slats of the wood.  I’m sure the house could use a nice vinyl siding job or something, but paint and caulk are much cheaper for now.

A while ago I scraped, caulked and primed the lower 8 feet of the wall which you can see in the picture and today we scraped another section and began to caulk any gaps and cracks between the siding. Tomorrow I’m going to try go get further up the wall, then caulk it and we’ll put some more primer on.

I’m using a bonding primer from Valspar and it works pretty good.  It’s very thick and covers up spots, wood grain and stains very well.

Bryn started scraping out the planting beds today as well and managed to strike and ants nest in the process and got swarmed.  Ah natures aerators and largest annoyance in the yard. At least for now they’re staying mostly in the yard! Once the planter is all cleared out of the weeds and such we’re going to put some landscape fabric down and to try and prevent weeds from taking root. then insert a few flowering plants before mulching.  Colorful flowers are nice but they’re so high maintenance to keep the weeds and such out of the area it seems like more trouble than it’s maybe worth.

Repainting the house

This weekend was the first time I was able to fly in First-Person-View, also known as FPV. The basic premise if you haven’t read my other posts is that you mount a camera and video transmitter to your model and transmit the video to a receiving unit. The receiver then projects the image through the geeky looking goggles with video screens in them.

I wasn’t sure what to expect for my first FPV flight. I have flown R/C aircraft for a fair amount of time, but am by no means a pro, it’s just a hobby that I enjoy. I have also flown various standard flight simulators on the PC. Microsoft Flight Simulator being the one I used the most. In that regard I have a lot of experience flying a plane from the cockpit view. It turned out it was no problem at all!

My friend Ollie stood by to take over the controls in case anything happened to the video signal and my other friend Bryn monitored the video down-link and handled the video recorder. In these first stages I’m very cautious and concerned about failures of the system which may lead to a dangerous situation so it’s good to have others looking out and offering pilot assistance. Thanks guys!

On the first flight I caught a wheel on the grass and a friend had to move the plane back to the gravel runway. On the second attempt I took off. It was an instant ‘woohoo!’ moment and I got a bit disoriented at first. Aside from Google Earth I had never seen the field before.  After I flew around a bit and started to recognize landmarks it was much easier to know where I was in relation to everything.

I flew around quite a bit and experimented some, then as I saw my battery voltage getting low I decided to land the plane. I did one low pass down the runway to see what it felt like and it seemed pretty natural. The second time over the runway I intended to land it, and I did.  The plane was all in one piece and the landing, while a little longer than it needed to be, was all in one piece.

A little later in the afternoon I did a second flight. We forgot to start the recording right at the start of the flight, but what was recorded was pretty good!  There is quite a bit of noise. I taped the front of the microphone to try and reduce wind noise, but picked up a whistle somewhere. Also there is electronic interference. I will find a better location to place the microphone for future flights.

Here are the videos, the YouTube links are below in case the embedded player doesn’t work for you.  You can also click on the videos themselves to view them on YouTube and leave or see comments and like/dislike.

Reactor Biplane EP FPV Maiden

Second Reactor Bipe EP FPV Flight

I love watching the Red Bull videos, they sponsor some incredible stuff and have pushed extreme sports by quite a bit. In the video below you can see the interview with Matt Hall after his harrowing close call with the river in Windsor. He admins that he lost track of what he was doing, and he was lucky enough to make a recovery.

The Red Bull air races are in New Jersey next weekend. I’d love to see it but the logistics aren’t working out. If you’re reading this, let me know if you think I should do everything possible to go see it, or save my money.

The email has the subject of “Filing Suit” or “Suit Filed” which should get almost anybodies attention rather quickly.

“We have been informed of the website(s) you’r company owns, registered through Go Daddy Domains.”

The message came from an address at novelideas-regos.com, some have been from “Mauro Blackwell” or “Willis Porter”  but it’s probably just random generated names. The novelideas-books.com domain does exist, but the novelidea-regos.com and novelidea-hasta.com domains do not resolve at all. My guess is the site was hijacked and had the excel file uploaded to a directory, and then these people sent out all these emails from unassociated domains.

Seeing the distribution of email addresses and senders, plus the terribly written email, without a specific definition of what domain/site would have infringed, I’m going to assume this some kind of spam/phishing attempt/etc.  Worse it directs people to view an online excel spreadsheet to find out which domains have ‘infringed’ which would be a totally boneheaded thing to do. (Don’t open the file!)

Very few search results came up for this, so if you’ve heard anything different , have received this yourself recently or have any more detail, please share.  There is a link about it over on namepros posted yesterday (external site: namepros.com).

Update: I seem to have found the source text for this email. The text looks like it was a modified version of a threat that someone received (external site: lazymanandmoney.com) from MonaVie back in August of 2009

I’ve done a few flights with the equipment and recording the video on the ground, but I have not flown it in actual FPV yet. The first flight was earlier last week, and while things worked pretty good, there was a problem with Motor/ESC interfering with the video camera or video trasmitter signal. I had been using one battery for everything in the plane. A couple of days later I started using a separate 500mah 11.1 volt battery for the camera and video Tx and everythin cleaned up quite well.

On the second flight (the one shown in the video below) I forgot to wait for the Eagle Tree V4 GPS to lock-in enough satellites. It seems like it has a little difficulty doing this near the camera and Tx so I will probably move the GPS unit back to the tail feathers. After the nose-over landing the GPS locks in enough satellites to provide usable information.

Most of the FPV Equipment is crammed in under the canopy of the Reactor Bipe along with the barometric altimeter. The battery stuck to the side of the plane powers the camera and the video transmitter only.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pPQhHJvcJo and the URL if the embedded player doesn’t work for you.

After dealing with the oil slop mess and tuning and having to carry a completely seperate set of tools with me to the field when I take the nitro plane, I decided to convert it over to electric.

REMOVED: Throttle Servo, Fuel Tank, Saito 1.15 4-stroke

ADDED: E-Flite Power 90 Brushless Motor (1800 watts max), Castle Creations ICE 80 HV Electronic Speed Control, 2 * Rhino 4S 14.4 volt 3.7Ah batteries (in series for 28.8 volts), Castle Creations BEC Pro.

The Twist 60 came with the aluminum standoffs for the big brushless motor, as it comes as a nitro/electric kit. I’ve never seen an electric Twist 60 on YouTube or elsewhere, so I wasn’t really what to expect for performance.

I did the conversion on Sunday, tested the motor and batteries on Monday and did the first test flight this Tuesday.  Below are the two videos from the motor test, and the test flight. One of my flying buds shot the video for me on Tuesday, it’s hard to video and fly at the same time

Twist 60 Electric Conversion Motor Test

Twist 60 Electric Conversion First Flight