Tuesday Miscellanea

GoodLuckBuy has a nifty miniquad in a cage.  Check out the video where it rolls up the wall and across the ceiling.

Notes for flashing the Arduino bootloader on the HobbyKing Pocket Quad.

Good Deal on USBASP programmer with USA shipping.

Proper motors for HobbyKing Pocket Quad:

Left Front/Right Back=Motor Wires=Blue(-)/Red(+)=CW
Right Front Back=Motor Wires=Black(-)/White(+)=CCW

.4g camera module on AliBaba.  "It can used for FPV Models,RC toys ,flexible video endoscope. Medical Video-scope, inspection camera,Industrial Video-scope, oral camera, fish-camera,under-water camera, Robot camera and so on. "

If you do the DIY endoscope, feel free not to let this blog know!

Kinematics of Mechanisms from the Time of Watt over at Project Gutenberg.  I love these old things!

This looks like a pretty good course and textbook for STM32 (ARM Cortex-M3) design and coding.

Monday Miscellanea

An interesting Instructable about quadcopters.  It doesn't actually have a lot of details about building one, but has some good low-level technical stuff.

An overview of the math of controlling brushless motors and gimbals.

Sainsmart sells nice looking Arduino clones and other interesting electronics. PLA too!

jj604 has a neat 1S/2S brick made from a LemonRX receiver and 1.7g servos.

Multicopter contest over at reddit.

Thursday Miscellanea

Some nice airbrush tutorials on RCGroups.  Be sure and look at the first three posts.  More here.  And a store-bought checkerboard stencil.

Cheap GPS hackery here. Very interesting, and it can save on some projects.  Ebay searchage for "U-blox PCI-5S" and "GPS Ceramic Internal Patch 1575.42MHz Antenna 20x20x7mm" about $15 combined!

Servo City has some nice pin crimpers.

Arduino Power Management here.  Using the JeeLib to access the Atmel low level sleep functionality.

Micellanea

Lynxmotion sells Aurora 9 gimbals.  "these gimbals feature high sensitivity, 8 ball-bearings, and adjustable tension. You can enable or disable self centering on both axis and enable ratcheting on the Y axis."  Somebody mentioned they can be fit onto a 9x by removing a pair of tabs and soldering the wires.

Servo City has pin crimpers at a pretty good price.

FMS Simulator Universal USB Cable.

Weekly Miscellania

ChineseJade.com is a highly regarded source for Walkera parts. $5 worldwide shipping.  Link is to the LB page.

Lightweight foam canopy replacements for nanoquads.  Cuts weight in half, made from 1/2in foam.

ServoCity has 2-axis spring-loaded joysticks... just the thing if your're thinking of making a tank-like controller!

Weekly Miscellanea

In which we close out browser windows which have been naggingly left open...

Sunsky has good prices on LEDs.  In particular, they carry ropes with 60 and 120 LEDs/m.  They've also got an LED controller for under $3.

Nifty swappable joysticks on a small Tx.  I've been wanting to fiddle with a tank-like controller for an arduino ground unit, but keep getting stuck on the asymmetric sticks.  I keep hoping to find a supplier of 9x sticks!

Banggood has some stranded 32 gauge wire in short lengths for $1, including shipping.

Lemon Rx (what a name!) has a DSM2 compatible Rx that has a UART and looks pretty nice for hooking up to projects with a real CPU.  Connection is 9600/8N1, and provides stick positions at 50 Hz with a string like this:



    [0x13][Ail][AUX][Gear][Ele][Thr][Rud][0x13]

where each value is an octet between 100-200.  More details at the link.


There's a PPM port too!

A nice idea for homemade nanoquad motor mounting.  And check out the handmade MultiWii FC!

Servo Magazine looks interesting and is recommend by Chris.

Weekly Miscellanea

Miscellaneous things this week:

• reversing a servo internally. tldr: reverse outside pair of three wires, reverse motor wires
• EasyCAP USB video input.  Good for FPV video capture, $9.  Several other models available. Mac software here and here.   I've got one on order, I'll review it when I get it.
• quad safety tip: toss a towel over the blades to stop them or keep them from spinning up.
• Ali Shan Mao flew the tiny QR LadyBird quad.  Object of intense desire!!
• Ecilop camera mount.  Fully sprung, uses battery as a counterweight.  Nifty!
• Repairing planes with Instamorph shapable plastic.
• Scotch Fasteners for mounting gyros.

Thursday Miscellanea

When I started this blog, I made it a point that it would be mostly my own words.  If it weren't something I was actually doing myself, I would write at least a little about whatever it was I was posting a link to.

As a result, I often have a half-dozen or more browser windows open to various interesting things, waiting to be written about. I think I'm going to start a weekly post to collect these things.  I'll try doing every Thursday evening, based on the logic that I've got a few things open now and it's Thursday evening.

• KapteinKuk discusses his firmware to convert a Turnigy ESC to a brushless controller.  Source code included!
• APM quad test harness.
• Why to ream a prop from the "insert side".
• ReadyMadeRC has some FPV stuff, including a tiny camera.
• Covering a foamy wing.
• Drill press on sale at Harbor Freight.