Testing Safe Positions

Some "postmortem" tests on the crashed airframe before it gets scrapped for parts.

A homemade wind tunnel like device constructed from a air compressor gun, outfitted with a string of yarn to show path the air flow. Plus a straight carbon fiber stick to show deflection.

Test on the wing (obviously)

Test on the tail (obviously)

Noted, this measurements are far from being perfectly accurate (though they were fun to produce), but they will serve as a base to tweak the model of desired plane's attitude compared to the angle of attack.

Designing Upgraded Electronics

With achieved milestone of (short) autonomous flight it's time to rebuild and improve the plane.

To optimize the build of new boards, my little brother had lend his talent and designed these:

New and shrunk demodulator board.

New and improved control board, now with a beeper for signaling states and hardware switches for continuous manual override on each channel.

Next step/experiment is having them professionally made from somewhere in China.

Tools for All

Until the plane is rebuild, hardware side will have to wait. Which leaves just enough time to work on the software a little.

Now on the market, straight from this project: rrTimeLapse

For all your time lapsing photography needs. As of now it supports resolution selection, start/stop timer or continuous shooting, amount of lapse time and auto focus selection. And it can do all that in the background, enabling use of other applications simultaneously.

Posted as Open Source, you can find it here:

http://code.google.com/p/rrtimelapse/

Or on the Android Market here:

P.S. If you find it useful, let me know!

Rooting HTC Legend

Problem!

The PPTP VPN connection, used to connect to the phone over mobile Internet was not in a working state on this phone. As it turns out, there is a bug in Android 2.1, causing some mischief.

So, to fix this problem, the phone was "rooted", with the intent of flashing a software image with added appropriate tunneling drivers:

Thanks to the modding community, not such a daunting task, but some time was spent finding the right rom with the issue resolved.

The winning combination can be found here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=744026