Jack Crossfire's Posts

Max2769: RTK GPS for all?

Posted by Jack Crossfire on February 23, 2011 at 10:54am

Here we go again.

Like mp3 encoders before LAME, RTK GPS based on inexpensive GPS receivers & software has long been a dream that no-one has been able to get working.

http://gpspp.sakura.ne.jp/rtklib/rtklib.htm

For years, a Japanese team has used a discontinued uBlox module that costs just as much as a commercial RTK GPS solution. Now the latest hobbyist movement is to use just the GPS front end & do all the baseband processing in software. Unfortunately, we have no idea what to do with baseband GPS data to convert it into RTK corrected information.

http://www.maxim-ic.com/datasheet/index.mvp/id/5241/t/do

For years, Maxim has had a GPS front end available for $11 but only now has anyone tried doing anything with it. http://unreasonablerocket.blogspot.com/2011/02/gps-progress.html

It doesn't look like he's going to have enough time to finish it.

There are some notes on using a laptop for baseband processing but no actual sourcecode.

http://www.maxim-ic.com/datasheet/index.mvp/id/5241/t/do#Application%20Notes

The only remaining step is really getting data into the format RTKLIB needs. This is really a movement worth getting behind, since RTK GPS would eliminate the pressure sensors, sonar, pitot tubes, & guesswork VTOL flyers have become familiar with. Well, unless you're in the business of selling pressure sensors, sonar, & pitot tubes.

Bay area snow day

Posted by Jack Crossfire on February 21, 2011 at 5:11pm

It's 1 of those really obvious things that no-one tends to get on top of, but we do have snow forecast for Saturday morning. Sounds like a good time to fly. Might be a good idea to get the aircraft ready. Are we getting it?

Our airframe is beyond its useful life. It might get some 30ft shots on video, but no stills or anything spectacular.

GPS guided speedometer

Posted by Jack Crossfire on January 16, 2011 at 11:30pm

So you bought the EM-406, the EB-85, the uBlox-4, & the helical uBlox-5. Now you're wondering what to do with all the GPS modules everyone hyped but which turned out to be utter trash everyone was trying to get rid of. Time to make a GPS guided speedometer.

It starts with our 1st & only answering machine in the days when cell phones were novelties. It got us through grad school. Really well designed for the available technology. It was time to put it down for recycled components.

All that tearing for a crummy LED panel.

This LED panel has 2 grounds & 1 pin for each segment. It goes up to 1.9V before getting too bright. The digit is selected by the ground, so it has to alternate.

Went with the obsolete EB-85.

There it is. All it does is show current velocity. No logging or other information. Could be done with a phone much more easily but this is free & fills the exact, immediate need as fast as possible.

With only 2 digits, it shows speed * 10 below 10mph & integer speed up to 99mph. Didn't have a display with a decimal point in the middle.

If we could afford a better display, the next most important feature would be elapsed distance.

If only MMY mobile could go back in time like the real thing.

Now the video of GPS guided speedometer in action. The velocity lags if direction changes. It really lags when walking from a complete stop. It's completely unreadable in daylight but useful at night.

LA vs Silicon Valley

Posted by Jack Crossfire on December 18, 2010 at 12:30pm

Been debating whether to chase aerospace jobs in LA or keep doing short contracts in Silicon Valley. It looks like you're just going to get short contracts these days. LA looks like the main Aerospace environment but it's quite a move & we've heard horror stories.

Our dumpy apartment was 15 years old when we moved in & now it's 25 years old. It's the longest we've ever lived in the same place & we've done the 680 commute twice as long as our dad. It was convenient living next to a golf course for flying & astronomy, but the area has become too bright for astronomy, we reached the limit of what flying can be done on a hobbyist budget, & commuting insane distances to live where you fly was becoming a bit insane.

Our last flight was some skywriting on Sep 26 to test the helical uBlox 5 & the IMU in 6 DOF mode. Was disappointed in the number of satellites & glitches were just as likely as the patch antenna.

With the IMU in 6 DOF mode, was doing attitude hold flights & crashed.

Attitude hold mode & not position hold is what you want for video. Unfortunately it seems we've reached the lifespan limit for this airframe. Tried ordering new motors from hobbyking with the cheapest shipping & the USPS lost it. $55 gone. Consider the $30 shipping a requirement.

The last photo of us was on Sep 23.

On Sep 18, flew in attitude hold mode to get closer to the camera. Then switched to autopilot. GPS glitched. PID limits were too high & she flipped over.

The truth about the helix

Posted by Jack Crossfire on September 17, 2010 at 10:14pm

Beauty crash. Every day has ended in a crash since the last blog post. Had the propeller mounting bolts come loose. Had battery voltage suddenly drop to 9.11 & a complete loss of attitude control.

Found cyclic integral isn't resetting between autopilot flicks.

Attitude hold mode is a joy to fly manually. She flies like the Corona again. Very stable & more visually satisfying than a bunch of symmetric propellers.

The helix was extremely noisy & random so it was time to try different orientations. The vertical orientation proved 2 satellites worse than the horizontal orientation. Unfortunately it is not completely omnidirectional. The only difference was from positioning the module on the nose.

Overall, the helix is getting 4 fewer satellites than the patch though its satellite count is more stable than the patch. If the module is mounted where the patch was, it's completely worthless. It's extremely fragile & really hard to mount. All roads are leading back to different mounting locations rather than different antennas.

No more sunny days until 2011, but there's always a party in Cloudyvale. This time it's another ducted fan VTOL that didn't work. Suspect control surfaces were too small & PWM was 50Hz. So basically, photos taken when recording video have the same resolution as the video.

Relations with the Air Force turned slightly better last Saturday. We'll see how that goes.

Funny how US is going in the exact opposite direction to the rest of the world in aerospace. Maybe you'll still get the Lady Gaga helipad.

HELICAL HELL

Posted by Jack Crossfire on September 10, 2010 at 11:23pm

Tried APC propellers again. Propeller struck ground but didn't bend. Motor broke off mount & propeller struck ESC, damaging something. ESC started smoking. Fortunately we test fly on the golf course instead of a dry field. It's been a long time of occupied storage, but now it's time to trash the APC's.

Finally got operational with the fulltime orientation hold. Next, the helical antenna finally got its show.

It certainly doesn't get as many satellites as the patch. It hasn't had any sudden glitches yet, either. It has a lot more of a random walk & seems to lag more.

The main difference with fulltime orientation hold is the lower D gains possible. That reduces the amount of oscillating. The human controlled cyclic needed such high D gains it always oscillated. The only option for full cyclic was different gains when in full autopilot.

We're not entirely crazy about fulltime orientation hold any more than basic cyclic. Now there's a very narrow limit to angle of attack because our accelerometer only does right side up. It needs a bit of margin to keep from going over 90' & flipping.

1 YEAR AGO

Posted by Jack Crossfire on September 3, 2010 at 9:30pm

was our trip to NASA.

The thing that disappointed us was how banal the aircraft were. Our focus was always making the hopelessly unstable stable through software & here our government was flying tried & true, statically stable gliders, pushers, & R-maxes. It was hardly the crazy stunt that Ares-1 was.

Sadly, we were depressed about the Air Force. Last year seemed to be a dead cat bounce driven by hope, but the most basic thing never happened with the Air Force & now we're winding down again.

We're not completely dead yet, but we conceded flying UAV's on the golf course is never going to be the happy escape that it was. That was really our #1 weapon against the reality of getting old, forsaking love & all the other stuff in the pursuit of feminism. There was but 1 way our hobby could fail & it failed as hard as it could. Thought it would come back for a year but it wasn't possible.

Nothing we did that year in place of flying actually comes across as enjoyable, just because it was a year in which progress came & went.

Indeed, the most trouble we ever got into was trying to forsake love by spending all our time flying UAV's on a golf course.

HELIX ANTENNA CONTINUES

Open drain hack to get the uBlox to work. It needs configuration commands every time it starts.

Ublox strapped in. Haven't seen any difference between this & the patch antenna on the bench.

Rebuilt yet again.

1 day later. PID calibration required for manual attitude control. The human takes it to levels the autopilot never did. This time, we're shooting to make attitude control permanent.

NOW WE HAVE CAMERA #4.

1080p finally got cheap enough to upgrade from the $100 Canon A's we were crashing to a $190 Sanyo, our very 1st 1080p camera.

The fixed lens & electronic image stabilization shouldn't break in a crash like the telescoping lenses & mechanical image stabilization did. Unfortunately this camera has a rolling shutter. Still photos suck. It gives up a lot of the picture fidelity of the $100 cameras in the name of HD video. Video is recorded at 13Mbps which is not enough for water.

The stock battery dies after only 40 minutes. Buy several aftermarket batteries.

Wasted no time in building a battery eliminator, but this circuit ended up heavier than a stock battery.

Continuous shooting mode requires reducing the compression quality, but haven't noticed any difference between compression qualities.

The battery charger blew up immediately due to a stray solder ball. Be sure to open it up if it rattles. Fortunately, managed to salvage it.

Now some ground footage in case you're in the market.

Looks like Dean successfully blocked Hobbyking from selling clones of its connectors. Ended up using those for all our gadgets & now the price is back to income tax levels.

More uBlox 4 U

Posted by Jack Crossfire on August 20, 2010 at 8:08am

There it is. The cheapest $47 bare board uBlox-5 available + $14 shipping.

As flimsy as it is, the hope is it'll be obsolete by the time it falls apart. The helical antenna only has 3 solder points, so the $90 brand name version probably wouldn't last longer. Knowing the wars about diydrones product offerings, we're not going to tell you where to buy the $47 special.

Voltage regulator attached.

Now your 1st look at the helical antenna. The rubber enclosure slides right off, revealing:

Is it a revolution in lighter weight, omnidirectional reception or another gimmick like fiber optic servo cables?

Unfortunately a killer commute & difficulties with the Air Force have this myth inching along. Have some commute footage instead.

GPS

Posted by Jack Crossfire on August 15, 2010 at 3:30pm

The day started with an hour working on the airframe. Doubled the mounting tape to try to stabilize the round rods.

But this time, GPS dropped from 9 to 7 satellites in a roll, causing her to fly into the sun. This module dates from when patch antennas were the gold standard & no-one knew omnidirectional antennas were required. Also note we didn't have the standby power cable, so GPS reset during battery changes.

There's the sudden trademark S-N shift of a GPS glitch.

Noted with the A480:

1) Auto exposure is disabled in continuous shooting mode.

2) GPS Patch antennas are going away for a reason. We've done everything possible with the patch, but angles of attack in the wind are too steep.

Another camera joins the crash graveyard.

That brings this flight to

battery: $100
camera: $100
GPS: $50
Props: $6

Just going to keep driving to Sunnyvale & repeating the mission until it works. It seems to be the unique weather.

Now the low bandwidth preview cam was the only thing that got some video.

Then, started thinking about re-enabling the accelerometer. 3 DOF IMU flight was intended for indoor vehicles. It worked real well & it felt more like a space program, so it got used for everything. The problem is the angle of attack is too steep & GPS too slow to get fast turns or tight hovers. Also want an attitude hold mode.

Finally, started thinking again about upgrading to the mighty rangevideo system. Analog video is so ancient & capturing it is so expensive, it's not really worth it. Despite being over 10 years old, 802.11 video is still insanely expensive & there is no digital 900Mhz video.

SUDDEN FLIPS

Posted by Jack Crossfire on August 6, 2010 at 8:30am

Things started off with a failed motor after the last crash. Turned out a wire sheered off from flexing during a crash long ago & the other 2 wires were nearly broken off. No way to spot it without removing the heat shrink tubing. There's no flex tolerance in those $12 motors. This in addition to a minimum PWM setting that was too low after a firmware update may have been causing flips for a while.

Next, it was off to test a new GPS derived heading algorithm & a 25 year old flash. This was the EOS 5D's lightest configuration with a flash.

The 25 year old flash wasn't much dimmer than the modern $400 580EX II but took forever to recharge. The GPS derived heading seems better.

Now the results of the new algorithm. Commanded & detected heading should be as close as possible.

Except for a few transients, it actually seemed to do better.

Finally, for those of you who use laptops initially instead of rendering 3D models of home made groundstations & buying laptops later, it's time to hack the Targus.

Targus deliberately prevented hackers from splicing unusual connectors to their power supplies by requiring a logic circuit in their connectors to turn on the power supply. Your only recourse to use a custom connector is some diabolical soldering & Dean.

NEAR MISS & ABORTED LANDING

Posted by Jack Crossfire on July 31, 2010 at 8:30pm

Everything was normal with the landing. For a long time, we noticed a lot of airplanes coming real close. Then right near the runway he firewalled the throttle & pulled up harder than any commercial pilot ever did. Thought he came in too low, aborted & we were probably going to die like our aunt. Thought about Major Marcy harder than we ever did before as the Air bus roared & fought for altitude.

As we rose above the clouds, it became clear we weren't going to be destroyed, it really was an aborted landing, & it was probably a near miss. Got a photo right before the abort & right after, containing the offending aircraft. The pilot announced it was a near miss but tried to play it down.

This was right before the abort. Was thinking how big our neighbor looked when...

Real steep angle of attack & full throttle. Those flaps retracted faster than we ever saw.

Makes you wonder what autonomous passenger planes will be like. The pilot said the panic climb was a standard maneuver in response to a computer warning & not a human call.

Suspect there would be a lot more panic aborts if a computer was unconditionally responding to radar. Maybe a computer could figure out if the near miss required a panic climb or a gradual increase in speed.

Re-enacting history

Posted by Jack Crossfire on July 17, 2010 at 12:18am

Found our 1st true love on myspace, which means......

It's time to return to where we 1st envisioned having a UAV & enact the vision seen 22 years ago with real hardware.

In 1988, intended to have a manually flown, solar powered quad rotor which flew over the East Bay hills to our 1st love & provided telepresense. Still not possible to this day, but part the vision involving hovering near the school can be realized.

There it is. The vision has finally been made real.

This is where we had the 1st ideas & drew the 1st pictures of what would 1 day be a practical UAV.

But all good things come to an end, with pride.

Forgot to screw in the servo horn.

MONTEREY AERIALS

Posted by Jack Crossfire on July 9, 2010 at 3:50pm

Stuck to a measly 200ft because of lack of horizontal space.

Still got a glimpse of Monterey airport.

The main event was not knowing where North was, the resulting loss of control, & spending most of our laptop battery power troubleshooting the loss of control. Flight operations were eventually stopped by laptop battery exhaustion.

Had her go into uncontrolled flips again in manual mode but managed to regain control. If a motor gets too slow it'll stall & the ESC will shut down. Eventually it'll restart & hopefully facing up. The 12x6's are so close to their stall speed this happens all the time in manual mode.

FLAG FLYING AGAIN

SUNNYVALE HELL

The run of flying was bound to end with SUNNYVALE HELL. Either an ESC is bad, the ESC's are designed to stall at a low RPM, or she was near too many C-130's & caught a virus, but this was another total loss. She started flipping for no reason at 255ft & hit the grass upside down with the engines cut off.

Last shot before impact

Last decent shot before impact.

Last decent shot.

Interesting radar dish.

Pulverized again. Another crash with pride brought to you by U. Know. Where..

Flight recordings showed these flips happening in both directions, the ESC's looked good under the microscope. Down to PWM going below limits & putting them into safe mode.

This week in aerospace

Posted by Jack Crossfire on July 2, 2010 at 3:16pm

Monterey flights were pre flighted but the fog never cleared. Then attempted a failed flight over Tomales Bay in which we discovered 2 years of vectoring motors to aim the camera had worked the mounting tape completely loose. Monterey would have been a disaster in that case.

Almost time to invest the $30 in an arducopter. Wait long enough & commercial technology eventually can take over what only custom systems did years ago. Would prefer a 32 bit processor on the smallest board possible, without all the extra stuff or fragile hirose connectors.

The trick with the Vika 1 airframe is real cheap crashes. All the parts are easy to make with hand tools. $10 of wood lasts 1 year of crashes. Who knows what CNC aluminum & landing gear would cost.

Did snap a video of the moon over the valley during a mounting tape test flight. It seems the wind is always going to tilt the propellers slightly.

MediaTek didn't materialize. Wasn't optimistic about it from the beginning. In the interview could tell #1 they were looking for someone with a formal education in computer science & not a jack engineer. #2 they obviously knew someone else & we were just a sales pitch from a recruiter.

However, probably going to start another job in 1 week not in aerospace mind you. Vacation fail.

This week in unemployment

Posted by Jack Crossfire on June 25, 2010 at 11:30am

It's the National Ignition Facility, the most powerful laser in the world. $4 billion. 500 Terrawatts. Enough power to feed 413,223 time machines. It requires 5 hours between each 4ns laser firing to cool down.

It was too windy to get very high. Only got 1 shot at 400ft. Angle of attack got to the abort limit where GPS could be lost & conventional control laws don't work.

Next, it was back over Pillar point.

Can't go very high in fog.

Finally, flew up over Napa again & for the 1st time, didn't crash. The wind in this area was the highest she ever flew in. Saw pretty insane angles of attack. GPS reception was real lousy. The video was made from several flights with the camera at different angles. 3 fans of freedom on the wing made strange noises in the wind.

Noted 2 anomalies in the video: a rubber band came off the camera & radio dropouts
caused several pitch ups. Got 1 in the video. Aft propeller was scraping something when it hit yaw limits.

Looking over the lwneuralnet sourcecode again, the net_begin_batch, net_train_batch, & net_end_batch functions are basically the definition of backpropagation through time with obscure wording.

The neural network is recurrent but not being trained that way. Was always a bit stumped on how to train a recurrent network to optimize its own flying. They only know how to recall ideal answers. In the past, fed tables from PID equations.

1 way is to just randomly change weights & select better performing networks over long periods of time. Maybe have a 2nd network be an emprical model of the flight characteristics. Then there's taking the times when it hit the right position & training off those.

Well, the only way we see this commissioned turkey going autonomous now is ground based machine vision. Even then, it's not going to be stable enough to fit indoors. A ground camera can sense roll. The magnetometer can sense pitch. Sonar would still be needed for position.

Golf course grass on the UAV? It happens to the best of us, just like marriage, death, & taxes. Autonomy without attitude sensing isn't going so well again. Her neural network was overloading her CPU.

This week in unemployment

Posted by Jack Crossfire on June 18, 2010 at 4:07pm

Flight test photos. It sux, but renaming a ship is bad luck. We still
fly ships named after Russian Heroine. Scorpio is very prominent this
time of year, providing an ironic background.

So in using a model to aid Marcy-1 navigation, the velocity due to
cyclic is always a sine wave in all 3 dimensions resulting from all 3
controls over time. Your goal is to integrate the sine wave over enough
time to predict future position.

The neural network implementation ended up a lot simpler than it was in 2007,
but can't be applied to Vika 1 without serious magic to work with a 3
DOF IMU. Leaning towards finishing the back propagation through time we
started in 2008. It has long been a dream to have a lightweight,
recurrent neural network library.

Well, that actually showed the neural network managed to stabilize the X
direction. Not getting the weather needed to give it control of the Y
direction.

THIS WEEK IN UNEMPLOYMENT

Posted by Jack Crossfire on June 11, 2010 at 11:30am

The unemployed masses continue to reach new heights in aerospace achievement never seen by cube or paystub. Updated vicacopter.com with new photos, videos, & sourcecode.

So the MRF49XA we've battled finally got an upgrade. It's the MRF89XA &
it has a 32x bigger FIFO, hardware packetizing, hardware CRC, & now
requires a 12.8Mhz crystal so throw away all your 10Mhz crystals.

Work slowly resumes on neural networks for Marcy 1. This time, just settling for
feedforward prediction of navigation points. Have no confidence in it.
Once again, the problem with any completely artificial intelligence
feedback controller is computing the long term offset.

Now that we're optimizing CPU usage for neural networks again,
discovered if the sonar period is too long, it causes the audio
processing to exceed the cache & slow it way down.

The Aiptek P-HD got its 1st ground video of a difficult takeoff to
400ft & landing. Landing on the narrow slit between the weeds still
takes manual control. Extremely high wind caused pretty crazy navigation
errors on the takeoff.

Kept making demo videos in case someone ever read our resume. Standard
autonomous operations with VicaCopter in HD & very windy conditions.
Autonomous takeoffs, ascents, landings, hovers. Marcy maneuver didn't
work very well on that 400ft descent because of the wind.

The problem with wind is the high angle of attack causes GPS to lose
satellites. She dropped to 7 satellites at 400ft.

Finally, have some more sky writing. The star trails of Scorpio are deliberately visible in the background. It was always conspicuous in all our years of flying. Used to think it was a sickle marking death to anyone who ventured to the center of the galaxy.

The smile inducing technology really killed us in this shot.

So many diydroners are unemployed, it's time to start a group.

ABOVE NAPA FINALLY, MARCY 1 SHOTS

Posted by Jack Crossfire on June 4, 2010 at 11:30am

GRIP TAPE TERRORISM

So found out the reason for the sudden flip during NAPA flight #1. Noticed on NAPA flight #4 the grip tape was slipping & managed to save her to see the grip tape completely loose on the ground. Unfortunately an attempt to reinforce it with duct tape failed & she crashed hard on NAPA flight #5 with the propellers having slipped forward & with the pilot assuming they were slipped aft, ramming Her into the ground at full power.

Fortunately the new camera mount had enough give to break before the
camera.

The grip tape binding round CF rods to the fuselage loosened in warm
weather & the only warm weather we flew in was NAPA. There was no way
to detect this problem without already knowing temperature could be a
factor. So grip tape is no good. There's a lot of torque on those CF
rods. Double sided mounting tape is the only thing that works, as
stretchy as it is.

ABOVE NAPA

Before the crash, finally snagged the flight which ended in failure previously.
Need another trip for video.

Some final mane shots before it's cut off. If Major Marcy was just a stranger, we weren't similar ages, & saying we look damn old didn't evoke eternal damnation, fire & brimstone for all time so help us God because of the negativity over Her age, we would say we look damn old, but we didn't say that.

The camera was shooting video this time & got some of the breakup. Unfortunately a few frames were still in the cache when the power was cut. She missed a water tank by only a few feet.

On to what must be her 10th fuselage.

3 batteries of hover testing.

This golf course is under Air Force control.

Made a 1st attempt at photographing Marcy 1 in flight. Best results
were using F: 2.8 shutter speed: 1s ISO: 400 Flash: 1/16 Focus: 3m
Air Force logo doesn't come out very well.

There is a way to smile, but it requires looking at something which
makes you fall in love.

THIS WEEK IN AEROSPACE

Posted by Jack Crossfire on May 28, 2010 at 11:30am

A490 HELL, MARCY 1 BICOPTERS, UNEMPLOYMENT RETURNS

LOS GATOS CAMPAIGN

Returning to the place we saw MAJOR MARCY in real life for the 2nd &
final time, this campaign produced a lot of decent images & videos.

It's an intriguing place, filled with billionaires selling electronics
that China sells for 1/10th the price, mountains cornering off the last
of the valley, & AIR FORCE HEROINES.

A490 HELL

Aerial camera #4 arrived. A Canon A490 with no accessible shutter
signal on the main board. Your only recourse is a rubber hand.

Video with the newest camera mount has lots of vibration. The old
rubber band shutter trick is very hard to get engaged.

Getting pretty frequent GPS failures again on Vika 1. It's going at 4Hz
& getting 7 satellites but suddenly returning a long shift in position
in the opposite direction. The only change from the days of 100%
reliability was getting rid of the full time power. If it just powers
up right before the 1st flight, it's prone to sudden failures.

Speaking of AIR FORCE HEROINES, have a photo from an unknown source.

M.M. most resembles the one on the left without a flight suit & with
more beauty.

Where were we.

MARCY 1 BICOPTERS

Marcy 1's radio got a break. Once again the UART receive needs to be
handled in an interrupt handler or it locks up. The joy of not having
an operating system.

Tried a number of variations on the bicopter theme. They all required a
balance beam & had the same instability. Pitching due to chord length
only explains it if the 2 wings are asymmetric. No idea what's
happening.

UNEMPLOYMENT RETURNS

It was the job that paid for most of our flying career but all good
things must come to an end. The main loss is the memory of all the
flying we did in that area, Corona, T-Rex, quad rotor, tri rotor, &
Russian Heroine, day & night flights. Almost took for granted that we'd
always have the field to take off from & look across the bay from. M.M.
was really close as the UAV flies.

This week in aerospace

Posted by Jack Crossfire on May 21, 2010 at 8:30pm

Camera mounts, Paramodels, Zeppelins, Marcy 1 bicopter

After a hard week of jury duty, Marcy 1 is getting converted to a bicopter like the Bladestar. In exchange for requiring more wing area for a given amount of lift, bicopters have a smaller rotor diameter & cancelling pitch forces which hopefully allow a smaller balance beam or lower RPM.

A sad finish to monocopters, for the moment. Still hope an outdoor monocopter can be built to give the maximum hover time per mA.

Marcy 1's main problem is a new radio crash where the serial port is suddenly locking up. Looks like a silicon defect.

New camera mounts for Vika 1 press forward. This is supposed to work with a ny tie or a servo. Main issue now is the A490 no longer exposes the shutter signal anywhere accessible without destroying the main board.

PARAMODELS

Paragliders are finally catching on, powered by European ingenuity.

http://opale-paramodels.com

The 1st pocketable UAV's with useful payload & flight time are going to be a parafoils. They spend a lot of time making lifelike male pilot figures, but the general idea is 2 brake lines attach to 2 servos.

Finally, in case your boss doesn't give you enough time off to watch a zeppelin maneuvering, it's the Airship Ventures blimp doing somezigzags & pitching. Unfortunately, Canon autofocus wasn't there, so
the 10MP photos had to be shrunken to 640x480.