About

Gender

Male


Location

Wood Dale, IL


About Me:

I am a software engineer by profession am interested in electronics, machining, robotics and RC. I restore vintage test equipment, use my lathe and mill for projects, make aircraft models and tinker with the development of microcontroller based devices. I grew up in Australia but now live in the US Midwest.


Hometown:

Chicago


Activity Feed

John Stanton commented on Chris Anderson's blog post FMA no longer carrying Z sensors
"I doubt whether making a Z sensor would infringe FMA's patent on the basic process of using the IR senors for aircraft stabilization. Making a knockoff entire system almost certainly would violate a patent.

Digikey sells the device, but at a high…"
May 29, 2009
John Stanton replied to Pier-Luc Caron St-Pierre's discussion Hobbico SuperStar
"Check out this item on Ebay - a $10 foam aircraft which makes the cost of mistakes low.

Crash Special/Newbie Trainer Airplane 3 in 1 Foam Kit

Of course this is just the airframe structure, but that is what breaks when the ground whacks your…"
Feb 26, 2009
John Stanton commented on jlcortex's blog post Bidireccional RC transmitter with ARM7, Xbee PRO, Bluetooth and a PDA.
"I also have been looking at a downlink. I have resurrected an old 27MHz RC unit as a development platform because it has the "sticks" (although not very good ones).

I am at the stage of defining a comms protocol, and believe that I should use…"
Feb 26, 2009
John Stanton replied to lionel's discussion Software guy so stupid hardware question ;)
"Yes, you can split the RS242 serial signal from the GPS and drive more than one device. Just use a Y cable.

Just be careful to keep the cable less than about 100 feet long or much shorter if you want to run at a high baud rate."
Feb 6, 2009
John Stanton commented on Chris Anderson's blog post Surprise! ArduPilot can do stabilization, too
"FMA has its IR heads for sales for $42 and as I recall free shipping. Digikey has the devices listed for $22 in small qties. Buying the FMA head and modifying, cannabalizing or using as-is is the logical way to go."
Feb 5, 2009
John Stanton commented on Reto's blog post Questions about ArduPilot code: checksum calculations/comparisons in the GPS Nav code
"For Otto. A simple case. Assume three key words, "dog", "cat and "bird". The order keyword table is then -
cat sy_cat
bird sy_bird
dog sy_dog

You have a scalar type declared to define the symbols (tokens) sy_cat etc.

where the second field is the…"
Feb 5, 2009
John Stanton commented on Reto's blog post Questions about ArduPilot code: checksum calculations/comparisons in the GPS Nav code
"I am a programmer who spent many years writing compilers and similar products requiring efficient parsers. A very successful parser is hand coded and tokenizes the input using a binary search of ordered tables of keywords. By converting to atomic…"
Feb 3, 2009
John Stanton posted discussions
Feb 3, 2009