Location
San Ramon, CA
About
About Me:
Head of blog rambling. The 1st 3 years of flying + more off topic posts are on http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/member.php?u=115141 Image processing, robotics, & aeronautics are on http://heroinewarrior.com Most diy droners are RC modelers who just want to automate their favorite model plane. I came from an image processing, software, & robotics background, not an RC modeling background, so my focus is on flight control, image acquisition, & blogs that no-one reads.
Please tell us a bit about your UAV interest
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Hometown:
Pleasanton, Calif*
Activity Feed
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/10/23827260/skydio-pivot-enterprise... one bows to the Chinese juggernaut, so you can't blame open sourcing the autopilot this time. Reviewers found DJI's obstacle avoidance to be inferior but cheaper. The…
"Definitely 1 of the appeals of gliders, besides the extra challenge of managing energy. Ground vehicles can go longer though."
The high cost of good RC truck kits, diminishing need for such kits & the noise of gearboxes made me look elsewhere for a robot platform. 3D printing a truck from scratch, with only a few metal parts still being off the shelf, was the next step. …
"Impressive compared to what we had 10 years ago, both in terms of the indoor navigation of the tello & the tracking."
"Maybe fly a neuralink impregnated dog."
Took a while to remember who Helen Greiner is/was. She was a founder of irobot. She bounced around the quad copter startups when that was big, but now has landed at a weed whacker startup. It has a simple string trimmer on the bottom which…
"You moving to Sacramento with everyone else? Bay area 2.0."
Interesting review of the Skydio 2 & Mavic Air 2. DJI has so many mavic's, the meaning of any of the product names has all become quite meaningless. It might as well be the DJI X AE A-XII.As before, the Sky Diddyo isn't intended to be flown in…
A scooter ran a red light at 25mph & smashed straight into it. Miraculously, only the wheel was smashed. He broadsided it & dragged it a few feet, but manely took out the food it was carrying. Scooters & bikes are in the grey area of not having red…
"I2C sounds like mechanism envy, because everyone who programs a computer these days needs to have I2C on their resume. Most of the smart batteries use a single wire interface."
"Microturbines have had a huge drop in prices in the last 10 years. They used to be $5000 & only sold by Jetcat. Now China sells them for $1500. Surprising they have to be mounted horizontally. That nozzle wastes a lot of energy. We've all seen…"
"There was a time when working on home made drones felt like the next moon program. We were making the future. 400 ft up was halfway to anywhere. Now, they're banned just about anywhere. Real moon programs now are a lot more expensive than…"
They began with the Skydio, a quad copter which could follow subjects through forests with only machine vision. Today, subject tracking cameras based on machine vision have reached consumers in standalone packages, the facebook portal, the OBSBOT.…
"Digging robots are real important, now that Mars is being opened up. Just not easy to test for those of us where land is $50 million/acre."
Finally, a novel wing rotor design which actually looks like it should fly. It might only be the finished look instead of the usual carbon fiber rods & duct tape. There's obviously still a torque problem on the wings, as it approaches higher…
"Remember dreaming about ion powered airplanes as a kid. By the time we discovered lifters 20 years ago, years of physics classes had killed the magic. The limit is the voltage at which air arcs. They don't blast ions & electrons out the back like…"
