DJI Phantom

Spencer Estabrooks, an indie filmmaker was kind enough to loan me his DJI Phantom quadrotor for a week. I helped him setup his gimbal unit to steady his GoPro for aerial filming. So today I did some adjustments and managed to get the seventh channel to control the pitch of the gimbal. Here is my first attempt at flying a quadrotor.

Yes, it came down uncontrolled, then I flew it back and then realized that the SD card I have can only store 7-8 minutes of flight, so I did not get the return flight on film. I will fly again tomorrow and film that flight.

Well a lot of first's today. First quadrotor flight, first video edit...

Well I was not happy with the strength if the trail wheel in the raspibot, so yesterday being a flood day (Calgary downtown is shutdown, no power) I rebuilt the raspibot chassis. See pictures:

So over the next couple of days I will work on the driver (python - nxt) code.

I have been working on my rapsibot. This weekend I got nxt-phyton installed on the Raspberry Pi Model a that will be commanding the Lego Mindstorm NXT that drives the robot (for now). I used some code from David Llewelld's Blog (hope I got the name correct) I plan on connecting from a PC/notebook or eventually another Raspberry Pi and joystick to remotely control my raspibot. One step at a time.

I cannot believe that I have not posted a picture of my most used Raspberry Pi setup.

This is the Raspberry Pi startup kit from adafruit Raspberry Pi Starter Pack - Includes a Raspberry Pi Computer, but of course the included case is their newer injection molded case :( I will have to get one of those soon.

Yet another device that takes up some of my time, Nanode 5 an Arduino board with built in ethernet support.

Too many different things to learn about.

Too many new toys to play with:

This picture show an alaMode shield for the Raspberry Pi. The picture was taken without the shield being plugged into a Raspberry Pi. I had plugged it into one of my Raspberry Pi's and ran several test sketchs on the alaMode to blink a led, read temperature and show the changing light on the photo sensor.

The alaMode is an arduino board by itself, but allows the Raspberry Pi to easily communicate with  the arduino micro controller and shields.

Here is another project I started this weekend, putting together several things I have been playing with (separate posts on each peace later).

My raspibot:

It has been a while since my last post.... I was only going to post about things I have completed and then realized that it might be too long between posts. I have been playing with a lot of different things. just this last week I was lucky to receive a raspberry pi camera. It seems that I lucked out and logged onto the Farnell website in the UK and found some in stock (I had problems attempting to setup an account on the North American website). I ordered a Raspberry Pi Model A and a Raspberry Pi camera and received them in less than a week.

Here is the first picture I took:

I will now start posting different things that I play with, completed or not...

Well I am a big fan of technology, but I get annoyed like most other people when new versions of software just do not work with older hardware.

My current complaint is with Parrot ARDrone 2.0, I received  one as a Christmas gift only to find out that even though they claim support for iPad's and other iDevices they do not mention you have to the latest hardware to get the full functionality. Unfortunately I have an iPad 1 which is not upgradable to the latest IOS and therefore cannot run Version 2.x of the ARDrone software. It is very disappointing to get such a wonderful gift to only use part of the capabilities without dropping a bunch of money on a new iPad.

I have found an interesting piece of software which looks to be very helpful in my desire to start tinkering with robotics in the future. It has a plug-in for the ARDrone 1.0 with support for my ARDrone 2.0 coming...

I hope to have more posts about that.

Randy.

My first computer,

This is a RCA 1802 microprocessor evaluation board and yes I bought it 30 years ago. It came with 256 bytes of memory, but I upgraded it to 3072 bytes. I could be communicated to by RS232 or Teletype. I did have a teletype with paper punch to store programs on, but too large to keep.

Randy.

My first blog post.

I have decided to start a blog about my interactions with technology in my personal life. It seems like I have always been involved with computers and electronics. Until 8 months ago whenever I did just about anything technology related it was ALWAYS in relation to how it would affect or relate to my working life (I was a computer consultant). Last spring I was offered a job.... I thought long and hard about it and decided that I needed a change in my life, TOO MUCH was about work and not enough about me and my family.

Now on my time away from work, when I think about computers and electronics it is for my pleasure and personal growth. For years I have wanted to build things with electronics to learn and have fun. I have once again gotten out my soldering iron and breadboard and am tinkering with building electronic circuits. one of the first projects is setting up temperature sensors so that I can track and log inside and outside temperatures where I live.

I will be writing about my trail down setting up, configuring and hopefully just having fun with some of the following technologies I have on my shelf:

•  Raspberry Pi
•  Arduino
•  Ardrone quadrotor
•  Lego Mindstorms
•  my very dusty N Guage train set

Randy.