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!

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

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’m looking forward to the fiber optic linking systems Intel is working on for PCs and peripherals. They call it a hybrid system, silicon potonics, the merger of optics and silicon on one module.

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?

Here’s some of the stuff I installed, all the pictures can be seen in larger versions by clicking on the gallery collection at the bottom of the post.

In the Catalina Itself: I used most of the Eagle Tree components inside of the plane. The only thing I left out was the airspeed monitor, thinking GPS would provide enough information. The GPS seemed to do fairly well, but I will try the standalone air speed monitor with pitot tubes and all in the future. It’s kind of a neat looking probe to add to the plane anyways.
Futaba R149 DP 72Mhz R/C PCM Receiver
Eagle Tree eLogger V3
Eagle Tree OSD Pro
Eagle Tree GPS v4
Eagle Tree Barometric Altimeter (more accurate than GPS)
WDR600 Camera
DPCAV 900Mhz/500mw Audio/Video Transmitter

Ground Station: I made a simple lash-up ground station as I’m still waiting for the Eagle Eyes to become available for antenna tracking, and need to build an actual ground station.  In the meantime I attached the 900Mhz receiver to the back of the patch antenna with Velcro and connected the antenna to it. I then made an adapter from Ultra Deans to the proper barrel power connector used for the receiver.  Using more Velcro I attached one of my older Outrage XP 3s1p 2200 Li-Poly battery packs to provide the ~12 volts power to the receiver.    The goggles connect to the A/V ports on the receiver and have their own Ni-Mh 8 cell battery pack (9.6 volts) powering a 7805 linear voltage regulator I added to them. Unfortunately the ground recorder did not arrive until today, so there is no video of the test flight.

DPCAV 8dBi 900Mhz Patch Antenna (It’s actually an l-com unit, but unless you buy in bulk, it’s cheaper from DCPAV)
DPCAV 900Mhz Generic Receiver (This is the one I modded with the new SAW filter)
2200mAh 3s1p 11.1v Li-Poly pack (12.6v fully charged)
Custom Ultra Deans to Barrel Connector adapter
Modified Trimersion video goggles w/7805 linear voltage regulator
Generic 2500mAh 7.6v Ni-Mh battery pack for goggles.

I tested the setup indoors and all was working well, but I needed to test it at the field. My friends Ollie and Bryn went out with me. Bryn shot some ground footage of the plane flying, while Ollie wore the headset to make sure that the video stayed clear throughout the flight. I flew the plane of course. It was a very very gusty day, and we only achieved one flight for just a few minutes before I brought the plane down. Ollie said that the video looked great throughout most of the slight with only a minor fade-out at a couple of points.

More testing will be done before I try FPV myself, and even then it will probably be with an eyes-on pilot and a spare radio attached with a trainer cord. If I loose it in FPV for some reason the backup pilot can take over the plane.

The first challenge was to replace the SAW filter on one of the 900Mhz receivers.  These 900Mhz and 1.3Ghz receivers use a stock DSS (digital satellite) TV receiver module meant for set top boxes, the 2.4Ghz DO NOT need to be modified this way (lucky you 2.4Ghz owner.. oh by the way, be careful using a 2.4Ghz R/C system with a 2.4Ghz video transmitter!)  The filter they include has a 21-27Mhz bandpass. The filters sit in the RF path behind the 900Mhz Rx circuitry if I recall correctly. The DSS boxes are setup for a dual channel LNB/LNA input and thus they have a larger bandwidth than required for our FPV stuff. By replacing the SAW filter with one which has a narrower bandwidth, we can get rid of excess video signal noise to provide a clearer video signal. Our video signal is only 4-5 MHz and our audio signal is just portions of that. The ECS-D480A SAW filter is a 17.6 MHz bandpass filter and will reduce noise and increase receiver sensitivity. Doing so can provide up to a 3db gain in receiver signal quality!

There are some concerns about this conversion. Some folks have stated that while the video signal quality has increased at range, the video tends to cut out more quickly when the aircraft reaches the extents of usable range.  I have not seen solid proof of this, however I have seen what I consider solid proof (3 video links) that it does improve video quality and for me that is enough to perform the modification.

As I read these forum threads I see people saying their 40 or 45 watt soldering irons are not powerful enough to remove the SAW filter. One thing you need to consider while soldering/de-soldering large jobs is the mass of your soldering iron. Manyof these 40/45 watt soldering irons are very narrow and slender. There is not much mass to them and the heat drains quickly from them into the work piece. Temperature controlled soldering stations can account for the loss in temperature and will quickly ramp-up the heating element to compensate for the heat loss. Generic type soldering irons (plug goes from wall to the iron) do not have the ability. Radio shack sells a 40 watt soldering iron in the stores for US$8.79 which has a large soldering tip mass and body mass. This will deliver enough heat to de-solder this SAW filter with solder wick/desoldering braid, no problem. If you cannot source this a higher power iron can be used. Remember it’s about heat capacity, not wattage. Most soldering irons will reach the same temperatures, but may not be able to reheat as fast or do not have the heat capacity to properly melt solder. Too much power and you will risk damaging your Rx module or circuit traces.

So now with that out of the way, onto the actual steps of replacement. The pictures are by the steps and formatted somewhat small. You can click on each image to see an embiggened version.

This is the Receiver (Rx) module, you may recognize the shape and design, it’s very common.

Remove the four screws from the case and slip off the top cover, you will then be presented with this.

Use a wrench or pair of pliers to remove the nut from the RF output connector where the antenna connects and carefully remove the RF module from the case. If you break a wire here you will have to re-attach it, be careful and deliberate and take your time, it’s not a race.

Once you have remove the RF module, remove the cover plates by prying them up very carefully. There are sensitive components under those covers and you don’t want to damage them! The big round thing you see under the cover is the old SAW filter. You will probably see a BIG blob of solder between it and the metal shielding of the RF module. This is the hardest bit of solder to remove.  With some -~extreme~- patience and the right soldering iron with soldering wick you will be able to remove it.  Heat the blob with the soldering iron, if it doesn’t melt within several seconds your soldering iron may not be up to the job, run out to Radio Shack. At this stage I had to drive 30 miles round trip and spend $15 for a larger soldering iron and some soldering wick at Radio Shack (You’ve got questions, we’ve got blank stares!).

Once you have removed that giant blob, you will need to use the soldering iron and wick on the back side of the board to remove solder from the 3 pins on the underside as best as possible. At this stage the old SAW filter is junk, but be very very careful not to damage or melt the solder on nearby components. Do some zen, some deep breathing, steady yourself and be patient. Do not DIG or PRY or STAB at the solder joints no matter the frustration. That is not the way to learn soldering and it will damage things!

Wow! Finally, that stupid #@$) !@#$@ #@$ is out of there. It might have taken a bit of time using those artful and careful soldering skills, and maybe a pair of pliers to pull on it gently as you heated up the whole can real good but gosh darnit it’s out of there! Make sure you use the soldering wick to remove any excess solder in the three holes so you can put the new unit in. BUT to be sure not to mess any of the other parts up or you’ll be placing another order with your favorite FPV dealer. You should get a cotton swab dip it in some rubbing alcohol (grocery store, health aids, 90%) and wipe down the area really good. You’ll probably be surprised at all the brown goo that comes up. That’s the flux from the solder, in case you were wondering(some were, some weren’t ).  Make sure you let it dry out good before the next step!

Hey that’s pretty sweet, you put the new SAW filter (can) in and put a new blob of solder on it’s side. You even made sure the tab on the new can was aligned with the mark on the board! It may not be as big and as inaccurate as those mass production shops, but it looks good, smooth and like a drop of liquid soaked in smoothly over the metal parts rather than a blob floating on the surface. Good job!

Now carefully go to the backside and using some fresh solder, make sure the two signal leads (they have narrow traces coming from them on the circuit board) are re-soldered well and clean. Then make sure the ground lead is also soldered well. To finish things up, heat up that pad right in the middle of the underside of the can and ad a tiny bit of solder until it all flows out nice and smooth.. not too much now.

Okay, now that you’ve done all that, and have taken pictures for your own blog or forum posts. Make sure you re-assemble the entire unit carefully. With this stuff, it may not be the newest technology, but it does require your attention and care.

As some additional resources I recommend the following links:

DPCAV.COM – SELLS BETTER SAW FILTERS

RCExplorer.se – Exchanging the SAW filter in a 0.9/1.3Ghz receiver for a better one

RC Groups – Replace Saw Filter on 900Mhz Receiver!
RC Groups – 900Mhz video receiver sensitivity improvement searching !(editor gasps for breath)
RC Groups – how to remove SAW filter from 900 rx’s?
RC Groups – To saw or not to saw?filter that is

Video of SAW Filter Replacement (by Vimeo user Ian, alternate method of removal of the old filter)

NOTE: all links in this post open in new windows or tabs, you will not be lead away from this site.

The systems usually consist of the following components in addition to the normal R/C and power equipment.

• Small video camera on the vehicle
• Video/Audio transmitter on the vehicle (usually 900Mhz, 1.3Ghz, 2.4Ghz or 5.8Ghz)
• A compact On Screen Display (OSD) which merges vehicle information onto the video such as GPS info, battery info, motor, temperature, signal strength, battery consumption, etc.
• Video receiver (sometimes two attached to two different antenna types for better reception)
• Video display (television, video goggles, laptop, etc)

With these basic components above you can build and FPV flying/driving system. More advanced systems include features such as the following.

• Head tracking for video goggles.  The camera on the plane will pan and tilt in response to the movement of your head so you can ‘look around’
• Diversity video switch or diversity receiver for switching between to the receiver which has the strongest signal
• Digital video recorder for recording your flights, could be a purpose built DVR or a laptop with capture device
• GPS system for OSD. The GPS allows the OSD to show location, altitude and speed. Some OSDs allow the GPS to be used for limited autopilot to return the aircraft to home and orbit in local airspace if radio signal to controls are lost and also for setting way-points and displaying them on screen like a satnav for a car, sort of!
• Autopilot systems for planes are available on more advanced systems, but this moves into UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) territory and is not necessarily limited to first person piloting.

As you can see there are many options available. For my personal system I have gone with the following equipment (prices in USD on 3/25/2010)

Main Video Equipment

• WDR-600 video camera from hobbywireless.com $139
• 900Mhz 500mw Video/Audio transmitter from dpcav.com (requires HAM / Amateur Radio license, see note below on HAM license) from DPCAV.COM $139
• 900Mhz A/V Receiver, Dual Output from DPCAV.COM $75
• Trimersion Video Goggles from ‘SafeSeller’ on eBay (to be heavily modified) $100
• Digital Video Recorder (DVR) not decided yet ~$100

Flight Data / On Screen Display (OSD) Equipment

• Eagle Tree OSD-Pro from hobbyking.com $81 ( I already have an Eagle Tree eLogger v3 for my electric aircraft which integrates with the OSD-Pro well, so I went for this OSD there are other OSDs available for various prices)
• Eagle Tree GPS V4 for integrated GPS functions with OSD-Pro from HobbyKing.com $80
• Eagle Tree altitude microsensor V3 from HobbyKing (GPS provides this functionality, but nice for non-GPS setups) $30
• Eagle Tree Airspeed Expander V3 from HobbyKing (GPS provides this functionality, but again, nice for non-GPS setups) $38

Video Transmitter and Flight Data Equipment Batteries

• 2 x Turnigy 500mAh 3s1p Lithium-Ion 11.1v 20C battery packs from DPCAV $13/ea (cheaper at HobbyKing for $8/ea but I was combining shipping from DPCAV. International HobbyKing shipping can be expensive)

Test Aircraft

• 2 x HobbyKing “Skyfun Jet w/Brushlet Motor” this is a knockoff of the small foam Funjet as seen in the video in the previous post but has received good reviews for crashable FPV fun. $64/ea

Additional Flight and Video Receiver Batteries from HobbyKing (for existing heli/biplane and new Skyfun jets)

• 1 x Turnigy 1800mAh 11.1v 3s1p 40C pack $16
• 3 x Turnigy 2200mAh 11.v 3s1p 30C pack $17/ea (1 for video Rx and also planes and helis)
• 1 x Turnigy 2200mAh 14.8 4s1p 30C pack $24

Progress So Far

I have received the video components (camera + accessories, 900Mhz 500mw video/audio transmitter, dual output receiver, Trimersion goggles) from DPCAV, HobbyWireless and the video goggles from ‘SafeSeller’ on eBay. All items arrived very quickly in good condition.

I experimented with the video goggles watching movies on my DVD/Blu-Ray player and also played with them a bit on the PC in BattleField Bad Company 2 (videos contain bad language). The head tracker works like ‘mouselook’ so it worked pretty well with that game, but ultimately the resolution on these affordable goggles is only 640×480 and it is very hard to make out targets you are shooting at.

Tonight I started hacking into the Trimersion goggles for my purposes. I will post a separate blog entry on these goggles and my progress hacking those over this weekend.

There is quite a bit of good information about them on RCGroups.com (create an account and search on ‘Trimersion’). Information such as hacking them for your own radio equipment, stereo (3D) vision, improving the existing built in video/audio Tx/Rx for you FPV purposes, if you wish, and so on. There are many other types of goggles of varying price as well and if you search for ‘FPV video goggles” on Google you will get many results. Another very good resource for FPV Information is FPV-COMMUNITY.COM there are many European posters who work with limited output power but have great solutions, great airplanes and a ton of great FPV videos. Make sure you bookmark the site.

HAM / Amateur Radio License (USA)

There are FCC regulations regarding all of the RF equipment you use. It is particular important to note that some video downlink transmitters will require an Amateur Radio license for use. Video transmitters which offer multiple channels to select from may not be permitted in the US since they can operate outside of the amateur radio bands(frequency ranges). You will find many dealers in the US only sell single channel video transmitters.  Several years ago a dealer was cited by the FCC for selling Unauthorized RF devices.

It is your responsibility to determine if you require a license from the FCC in order to transmit on the frequencies you will be using, at the power levels you will be using. I will also cover more of this in a future post.

There is good news however, the Technician class license should be all you need to use higher power transmitters. To qualify you need to go to a local testing location with a drivers license or equivalent ID and $15 and take the test. I would highly suggest doing some studying on the material first though. The questions involve general knowledge questions, questions about electronics and questions about RF and basic practices. Most people should be able to pass these if they study. You do not need to know morse code.  Once you pass the test your information will be sent to the FCC and your HAM callsign assigned to you, once you’ve got all that done, then you can legitimately use the equipment. $15 bucks to legitimately do higher power FPV is a good deal. This also opens you up to using different bands for your R/C Control radios and use specialized equipment without risking trouble.

While it is quite possible to buy and use the equipment without proper licensing, it is also illegal and threatens the general hobby and continued availability of this equipment to hobbyists. Those who are not able to self-regulate within a hobby risk the government taking over the regulation and making things very difficult for everyone who wants to explore this part of the hobby.

For more information please go to the “Amateur Radio Relay League – the national association for Amateur Radio” web site to find study resources, sites with sample tests and other information you may be seeking.

UPDATE 4/29/2010: In case your curious, the Nexus One still does not have support for the multi-color ball, thumb ball, navi-ball or anything else you would like to call it.

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.

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!

Vigoro  3015V Water Timer / Sprinkler Timer

We ended up going with some garden / home improvement store variety water timers that you just hook your hose to.  The first one we purchased was a ‘Vigoro Model 3015v” branded item which had a lot of programming flexibility, manual override and, in this package, the moisture sensor. The water timer without the sensor function is $24.95 at home depot. It is pictured below.

Overall this seemed like a pretty good timer. It has a lot of flexibility in the programming schedule. You set the current time (in hours only) and set the start time (in hours only). You then program how often the timer will open the valve in hours or days to water your lawn, and for how long it will do it each time, in minutes, or hours.

We used this unit at first on four oscillating fan type sprinklers. I noticed right away that the water pressure to the sprinklers was very low when they were ran and series (VALVE –> SPRINKLER –> SPRINKLER –> SPRINKLER –> LAST SPRINKLER) type setup. I bought a 4 way splitter valve and then split the hose 4 ways to the 4 separate sprinklers. This evened out the pressure much better (and is called a parallel configuration)

While the water pressure had improved with the 4-way hose splitter, but it was still weak, this of course is not the sprinkler timers fault but just additional useful information.

The water sensor does a reasonable job, and lets you set how sensitive is.  The setting varies from 1 water drop to 3 water drops to tell the system how wet you want your ground. If the moisture sensor detects that your lawn is wet, to the level you selected, the main unit will bypass any sprinkling times until your lawn dries out enough to require watering again.

Special Note: Attach your hose to this unit before attaching the wireless receiving antenna.  It is much more difficult to get the hose on when the antennas is attached! (You’re welcome!)

Model: Vigoro 3015V  Water Timer / Sprinkler Timer w/Wireless Moisture Sensor
Cost: $24.95 (excluding moisture sensor feature)
Pros: Simple to setup, manual override, reliable, easy to read.
Cons: Splits hours evenly.  a 6/noon/6 schedule is not possible, you only get a midnight/6/noon/6 schedule, and I didn’t want to water our lawn at midnight and I didn’t want to water too early in the morning, or too late at night like I could achieve with an 3 x 8hr schedule.
Note: They do make a 2 zone programmable timer with more features for another 15 dollars.  So while this model wasn’t optimal for us, the other one may be an improvement. Additionally, this is a re-branded Orbit product.

Orbit 4 Zone Water Timer / Sprinkler Timer

After messing with the Vigoro module and having the water pressure problems as well as the ‘watering at midnight’ problem as well with that unit I decided to go to Lowe’s and see what they had in the way of a timer with multiple zones. Well, there wasn’t a lot available other than this Orbit ‘Complete Yard Watering Kit’. In all honestly it didn’t come with the 300 feet of hose or 5 25 dollar sprinklers But it did come with a 4 way valve manifold, the timer module and 2 electronic valves, expandable to 4 (additional valves are 12.95, mail order only from Lowe’s site).

This timer seems pretty well built, and it’s pretty easy to setup. It is somewhat the same parameters as the Vigoro module above with the addition of individual zones.  As an added bonus, they seemed to know you did not want to water your lawn at midnight, and it allows you to set a schedule for 6am, Noon and 6pm, and to skip any overnight watering possibilities.  GOOD IDEA!

With the addition of multiple valves, you have multiple sprinkler zones. I split the sprinklers down into 2 watering zones for the main peninsula lawn and set the timer to run both sets of control valves, one at a time, for 20 minutes during each watering period for the new lawn. It works great and reliably.

I like this timer much better, but it has it’s own problems as well. While the programmable portion of the timer is pretty great. The fact that you have to buy additional zone valves via mail order only is kind of a lame, but not impassable barrier. Additionally in manual mode it would have been a nice feature to be able to set individual times for each zone. With this module you can turn on one sprinkler zone for X minutes.  Or alternately you can turn on all zones for X minutes. You cannot set Zone 1 for 10 minutes, Zone 2 for 20 minutes, Zone 3 for 10 minutes, etc.

Model: Orbit Complete Yard Watering Kit (Model #: 91591)
Cost: No longer available, cheaper version now available for around $49
Pros: Very flexible timing options and multiple zones. Expands up to 4 valves and is reliable. While discontinued the additional valves are still currently available.
Cons: You can only buy sprinkler zone control valves through mail-order. This product has apparently been replaced by the 27908 model for $48.97 which seems of lower quality and construction, though it has a lower profile as well.

Summary

I wasted so much time and money with these stupid sprinkler timers we might have been better off trenching and putting in my own sprinkler system. By the time we got everything taken care of working right, the amount of money spent on sprinklers, hoses, timers, watering at weird hours, etc could have just been resolved with a real sprinkler system with a multi-zone timer for a couple hundred more. If you’re not able to do your own sprinkler system installation, then these may be the way to go, if you’re just being lazy you’ll regret it. Perhaps next year, things are working okay for now but not optimal.

If you liked this article, please see my other Lawn Related Posts and also my new article where I disassemble the Vigoro 3015v to see how the valve works.