Ark's Tech Blog

Kobo Libra Color

2024-12-06T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve had a kobo Aura HD that a friend sold me for about 10 years now. I liked it way more than the old nook I was using (although I missed the page turn buttons) and the fact I got both of these readers for less than $30 meant I was always reluctant to spend the money a new one would cost. However I finally got so fed up with the Aura being so slow I could only really turn pages and often it would get in a mode where each page turn forward took it back a page and I’d have to reboot. So I got myself a new reader with page turn buttons and that meant the Kobo Libra Color. I don’t regret it one bit.

I’ve been filling it up with kepub files from standard ebooks. kepub files use a better renderer and are much faster. I converted all my old .epub files into kepub by using kepubify. They even have a web version if you can’t install the command line one.

I got a cheap case from aliexpress and it’s great. I also got some screen protectors too. I also orderd various bluetooth ring page turners and I’ll report back when I find one I like I’m trying this and this

To use the page turners I’m using btpt which allows you to specify commands for each button. I also installed nickelmenu to quickly allow me to turn on bluetooth with a menu item. It’s early days and I needed to get a nightly build for bluetooth support. To install the nightly version get one of the artifacts from a green build on this page. I followed the instructions in this thread.

You can get free books from the following places in order of preference.

I’ve also got on board with some of the connected features of the kobo platform. I now keep all my kepub books in dropbox and have them sync to the device automatically. I would keep them in Google Drive (where I had them previously stored), but it seems to need access to all your google drive files rather than just a single directory like it does with dropbox. I did have to flatten my very organized directory structure since dropbox seems to only sync the root directory unless you tell it to sync seach subdirectory one by one.

I also got on board with pocket to save web articles and then read them later. I found the official pocket chrome extension to want too many permissions (all websites!) but the save to pocket privacy edition Chrome Extension only gets permission when you click on it. I also use the feedly pocket integration to save long rss articles for reading later.

I haven’t yet played with koreader but I might give that a go at some future date.

Setting up my chromebook as a flight computer

2024-10-23T00:00:00-07:00

I set up an old ACER C740 chromebook as my flight laptop and here’s the steps I used.I used MrChromebox to install ubuntu. I added a 128GB USB drive and set that up as /usr so I’d have more free space.

libgconf-2-4 was missing so I added deb http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lunar main universe to /etc/apt/sources.list and sudo apt install libgconf-2-4

download and install

sudo apt install emacs git python3-setuptools fuse make fonts-inconsolata screen
sudo apt install ruby-dev ruby-bundler gcc libssl-dev g++ (for bundle install / jekyll stuff)
sudo apt purge gdm3; sudo apt autoremove; sudo apt install gdm3
echo "options snd_hda_intel power_save=0" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/audio_disable_powersave.conf (fix crackling sound)
Google Chrome (turn off Windows Scrolling Personality)
ELRS Configurator
EdgeTX Companion
iNav Configurator
Betaflight

ELRS Configurator

For ELRS Configurator I needed to sudo dpkg -i --path-exclude=*/opt/*/icons/* expresslrs-configurator_*.deb until this bug is fixed.

EdgeTX Companion

EdgeTX Companion has an .AppImage in that zip file. I copied it to /usr/local/bin/ and chmod a+x it then I made this file in /usr/local/share/applications/EdgeTX Companion.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Terminal=false
Name=EdgeTX Companion
Icon=/usr/local/share/icons/EdgeTX_StarLogo_Color_Vector.svg
Exec=/usr/local/bin/EdgeTX_Companion_2.10.5-x86_64.AppImage

I got the icon from here (via here).

Emacs

To make it so that Emacs only shows as one icon in the dash on the side I followed these instructions and added =emacs to all the --alternate-editor flags in /usr/share/applications/emacsclient.desktop and then pinned that application to the dash.

Everything broke, machine hung

At some point during this, everthing broke and I couldn’t unlock the machine and then it wouldn’t boot into the graphical UI and hung while the last message displayed was about gdm. I managed to fix it by booting into recovery mode and uninstalling and reinstalling gdm. I think these are the steps I used:

power up and keep pressing the escape key to get into the bootloader menu
select the default boot option
keep pressing escape again and you’ll get a grub> prompt
type normal and then press enter and press escape one more time
you should now be in a simple grpahical grub menu where you can select recovery mode
after recovery mode has started select to drop down into a root shell
type apt purge gdm3
type apt autoremove
type apt install gdm3
control-D to exit back and start up as normal.

Moving /usr to a different disk with unbuntu on a chromebook

2024-10-22T00:00:00-07:00

I have a acer c740 chromebook which I take on trips with me. It was one of the fastest cheap chromebooks when it came out and it’s still fine for browsing the web and watching movies when I’m travelling. You can still get them for under $50 on ebay. Make sure you get one with 4GB of ram if you do get one. I used to use this chromebook benchmark list to compare various models. The Acer C740 is from Feb 2015!

Unfortunately Chromeos stopped supporting this hardware a few years ago so I used MrChromebox to install Gallium and then eventually that ran out of support so I moved over to ubuntu and that went pretty well. The 16GB hard drive was a bit of a problem. I’d have to install updates piecemeal otherwise I’d run out of disk space. I would generally only have 1.5G free at most.

To free up space I’d have to run

dpkg -l linux-image

and see if I had multiple versions installed and if I did run something like this to remove them.

sudo apt remove linux-image-6.8.0-45-generic linux-headers-6.8.0-45-generic
sudo apt autoremove

I might have to reboot to get the latest kernel running before I could remove the old packages.

Anyway, I wanted to free up some disk space so I had the genius idea to move /usr to a different disk. I got one of these 128GB USB 3 drives that can just live plugged in all the time. Here’s how I made it work.

Plug in the drive and open the apps and under Utilities you’ll find Disks or you can just run gnome-disks from the terminal command line. select your 128GB drive and remove the partition on it. Then add a 16GB partition and call it usr and make it be for linux. Then add an EXFAT partition for the rest of the disk (I called mine data). now mount your usr and this’ll show up under /media/$USER/usr ($USER is your username). now copy over /usr like this

sudo rsync -Phav /usr /media/$USER/usr

That’ll take ages, but once it’s done you can then add this line to /etc/fstab

UUID=blah-blah /usr ext4 nodev 0 2

You need to replace blah-blah with the UUID of your usr partition from the disks program, click on the partition on your 128GB disk and the UUID should appear underneath. You can copy and paste on a chromebook by clicking the bottom right corner of the touchpad.

Now you need to move the old /usr so the new disk can mount onto an empty directory. As soon as you do that last command everything is going to stop working. make sure it’s the very last thing you do and everything else is set up correctly beforehand. Especially the correct UUID in /etc/fstab.

sudo bash
cd /
mkdir /old.usr
mv /usr/* /old.usr/

now reboot and it should start up just fine verify that you can ls files and sudo ls too from a terminal and if that works you can

sudo rm -rf /old.usr

Now you have oodles of space. Which you will see when you run this command.

df -h / /usr

If you want even more space you can do the same with /home I didn’t do this because I think the internal disk is faster than a silly USB drive and I wanted /home to still be fast.

If it all goes wrong

If it all goes wrong and your machine no longer boots, you can make an ubuntu bootable USB drive boot from that into safe mode and then mount your chromebook root filesystem and fix whatever is wrong. Good Luck!

The Best Headlamp ever

2021-10-10T00:00:00-07:00

This is the best headlamp ever. Great for hiking and camping and even just working around the house. Here are the reasons why

It’s bright
It’s very light
It only uses one AA battery so carrying spare batteries is easy.
After it’s been on for a few seconds pressing the button ONCE turns it off
It turns on at full power
It has a hinge to change the angle (unlike the Petzl Zipka)
It has a red/night mode which is perfect for finding things in your tent at night.
It’s cheap.

I’ve found this lamp in several places at several price points. Before I found it I also tried quite a few others like this Fenix HL16 which is o.k. but not nearly as good. This headlamp looks similar but is nothing near as good.

My first version of this headlamp was a Rayvenge T1A whose amazon page has vanished. Here’s some flashlight nerds who seem to like it and have ideas on how to improve it. I did try this SmarterLife light but it didn’t work out of the box so I returned it. I found the same light on ebay as a Lixada J4M9 This one works great, but I can’t find it anymore.

One time I dropped the light and the little plastic pin that makes up the hinge broke. I was bummed. I had a working light but no way to point it anywhere. I took half an old gopro extention mount and filed a V in it and expoxied the light into that and it now works great as a little bike light on my gopro helmet mount.

Boom Boom twin boom simple stick with inverted v tail

2021-03-01T00:00:00-08:00

Before I was even finshed building the Purple Pusher I had plans on how to make it better. I had ordered a variety of carbon fiber tubes and they finally came in so I set about building this plane.

I built a standard hanger simple stick airfoil, it didn’t have to be quite as wide as the purple pusher. I also threw in some LEDs just in case I’d like to light them up in the future. The carbon rods weighed 9g each which is much less than the 41g for the tent poles I was using.

I tried really hard to make sure the booms were parallel.

I thought the tail on the purple pusher was too heavy and thought about doing a v-tail and have it be held at the tips rather than the bottom of the V, then I thought I could just invert it and my radio would likely know what to do. I felt clever about thinking about that idea and then learned that lots of planes already do this. Turns out the flaps are called a ruddervator.

I also did some math to try and work out the size of the tail. I wanted to keep the vertical and horizontal surface area and the size of the rudder and ailerons the same as a simple stick.

This website about plane design and common dimensions was super helpful.

In the end the tail looked stupid being this big. so I ended up chopping off quite a lot and it was fine. I had tried to look up some recommended values.

Part of my plan for a quieter plane was to mount the motor above the wing slightly. I also read that the axle of the motor should point through the center of gravity so I angled it down slightly. This aligned with what I had seen on my AXN fLoater first plane. I glued and then used reinforced packing tape to hold the motor firm to the fuselage.

Lots of bevel cuts led to a really tidy fuselage.

After working out where the battery should be I cut cut teh fuselage to length and add a battery compartment.

The finished boom boom! It’s called the boom boom because it’s orange and so is Basil Brush.

It’s extra orange underneath.

I put some foam on the front of the motor mount to help the air flow over it.

You can see the washers I used to shim up the motor so it pointed slightly down.

Compared the the Purple Pusher it’s quite a bit shorter. But still not as short as I’d like.

Maiden Flight

The maiden flight has to be one of the funniest fails I’ve ever done. good grief.

Here’s what I had done WRONG:

I moved my motor higher and angled it down a little so it still pushed through the CG which I’d read about. This just pushed the nose down when I throttled. This is the real reason for the crash. Once I had it pointed level it flew better.
I had the tail control rods set up so that they pushed to pull up, which is awful, since they can flex, this made the pull up the spongiest direction.
I had the ailerons flat with the TOP of the wing rather than with the flat bottom and I feel this might have also caused some downward pressure too.

Considering how bad that crash was, the damage was pretty minimal, even with that huge long nose.

The second maiden flight went much better!

After the maiden flight I found I had trouble pulling up. I traced this down to my elevator being controlled from a control rod underneath. so when trying to climb the thin wire was pushing the elevator up. I moved the wire to the top of the boom so now it would need to pull to make the elevator go up and it was much better after that.

It flew o.k. as a pusher, but I still didn’t like the long nose. Because the fuselage was so easy to change I made a new one to have the plane be a tractor with the motor at the front.

I made these bomb bay doors for the battery access.

A velcro strap around the fuselage held everything in. It worked well!

Final wight without battery is 455g.

I really liked having both servos in the wing and feel like I could put the receiver up there too and then switching the fuselage would be even easier, a short servo extension wire could be used to connect to the speed controller.

Webcam Light Ring

2021-02-25T00:00:00-08:00

I quickly put together a webcam light ring. It’s a 16 x ws2812 ring connected to a LED adapter and ESP01 powered by a cut off USB cable. It’s in a little black box with slightly filed clothespins to hold it to the screen.

In the end I wasn’t super happy with the results. The led lights reflected too much off my glasses. I’ve since got some good diffuser plastic (some LED garage lights died) so I might try again, but I was thinking maybe the diffuse lgiht should come in from the side.

I was going to put a webserver on it to allow you to choose the colors but I was still paralyzed with the whole LUA or MicroPython thing and since I wasn’t happy with the glasses reflection I just abandonned it.

If I pick it up again I’ll use this light color/temperature and makeup reference and a handy dandy rgb to color temp. I realized it depends on the LEDs but it’d be a good starting point. I guess I could actually measure it but this’d have to be way more successful for me to put that much effort into it.

Puple Pusher FPV

2021-02-24T00:00:00-08:00

My first attempt at flying fpv wasn’t a huge success. The camera would cut out when I turned the motor on (since it was so close). My goal with the purple pusher was to try it again. I’d verified the plane was a stable platform and quite easy to fly.

The original nose just slid off (and allowed you to easily change the battery.

I made an FPV nose with a camera, 200mW transmitter and a wire to connect to the battery balance connector.

For my first attempt I just held it together with an elastic band.

The wire was long enough to go through a small hole in the tip of the fuselage. If this design worked maybe I’d play with using a magnetic connector.

Here’s how everything crammed together inside.

I wish I’d hit record on my first (and only) FPV flight. It started off o.k. The plane still felt very fast and I guess I flew a little further away since I just over the fence by the road I started losing control. I still had a crystal clear video picture so I was able to watch as my plane flipped around and finally plowed into the ground. At least I didn’t fall down while wearing my googles. Luckily I missed the road and the path and landed in the long grass. By the time I got down there the motor was still trying to spin, the fuselage was slightly bent (not surprising considering how long it is), but overall it wasn’t totalled so that was good news. So there we go again, another failed attempt. I’m not totally dissuaded but maybe I need an even slower plane to plod around for my next few attempts.

Rocksta Crawler FPV

2021-02-23T00:00:00-08:00

I really wanted some Z-Bend Pliers but the shipping was going to be expensive. So I had a look at my wishlist and ended up wtih a Rocksta 1/24 AWS Crawler and a battery or two.

I figured it’d be a little bit of fun to play with, but when I took it to the rocks near where we fly and some friends had already built a little course it was SO MUCH fun. I honestly thought it’d be a little nerdy fun for a few minutes, but I was engrossed in trying to get my little car over some tough terrain. I was impressed with what it could drive over and the option to change how the 4 wheel steering behaved made it even more interesting. The fact we all had the same car meant that it was an almost even playing field. They had after market tires so that was a common excuse for success or failure.

Of course my FPV obsessed flying friends had put cameras on their crawlers. I had a small 25mw camera and transmitter so decided to try and set it up too. My first attempt is above, the camera is moved by a little rod attached to the steering. It didn’t end up working too well, but it was a good first simple attempt. I glued a Lego brick to the bottom of my camera so I could easily mount it in different places and even use lego blocks to change the angle it was viewing at.

The second attempt was more like my friends’ I mounted a servo under the roof and had a control rod that moved the camera which was on a little lego 2x2 turntable. It worked great!

For the wiring I just spliced into the steering channel. I even powered the camera from the same servo power. I’ve since learned this is a BAD idea and people have blown their control boards doing this. So I intend to replace the wiring and only splice the signal from the steering servo and get all my power via a BEC connected to the battery balance connector.

I even added a lego hinge and was able to tilt the camera up or down so I could see the wheels. I can use this with my cheap FPV setup and it’ll be like I’m in the car!

Hopefully you can see the hood cam and tilted video above.

It says the protocol used by the transmitter is AFHDS 2A which is the same as the Flysky transmitter I used with my planes. I was really hoping I could use that rather than the trigger/wheel controller it came with but I was unable to bind the two.

I’ve since learned that the best battery to fill the whole compartment and get the most drive time is a Tattu 450 75C 2S

The Z-Bend pliers are great by the way, well worth it.

Flite Test Soarer

2021-02-10T00:00:00-08:00

My daughter’s Flite Test Storch has been through quite a lot so we were looking for a new plane for her to build and fly. She wanted something slow and stable, so we built a Flite Test Simple Soarer.

I cut up all the foamboard in advance and we were able to put it together in a couple of hours. Unfortunately the lack of ailerons made it super boring and hard to fly so we weren’t very thrilled with it at all.

20 Minute Switch

2021-02-09T00:00:00-08:00

After shoulder surgery, we’re borrowing a cold therapy machine you use it 20 minutes on, 20 off. but to turn it off you need to unplug it. With a simple esp01 and a relay module it’s all automatic now and tidy!

Here’s what it looks like inside. Luckily for me the machine was powered by 6V which is not too much to power the relay board and ESP01 so I just leeched the power off that and so the device fits inline with the power plug. Luckily I had a plug and socket that fitted because I take apart everything and keep what might be useful before I throw it out for e-recycling. Here’s the code. Of course it wasn’t all trivial, the relay board had a problem that needed a simple fix.

Here it is in use!

It could be much better but it works fine enough and we included it when we returned the unit we were borrowing. Hopefully the owner still uses it. I wish it didn’t double click the relays when you first plug it in and ideally I’d like the ability to change the timing (both on and off time periods). I had planned to play around with putting a webserver in it, but then I discovered micropython on the esp8266 was getting more mature and wanted to play with that for a different project so didn’t want to do it twice in two languages. I don’t particularly enjoy writing LUA code.

I made another of these for a friend who also had surgery. His needed 30 minutes on and 60 minutes off. The code was easy to change. Also I didn’t know what power was available so I just used a USB cord to power the ESP01/relays and then it was just a simple switch. Not quite as tidy, but I was doing it all remotely without access to the machine. He said it worked great for him.

The Purple Pusher Twin Boom Simple Stick

2021-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

I made a Twin Boom Pusher based on the Hangar Simple Stick and maidened it today and it went pretty well. Here’s the goals for this project:

as fun to fly as my Hangar simple stick
allow me to play with FPV and have the camera as far away from the motor as possible.
be quiet when flying
as easy as possible to change the battery
reduce the number of propellers I break.

Wing and Tail

I built a standard hanger wing but made it as wide as a 30” sheet of foamboard. This would leave room for an 8” prop. I cut out a tail of similar size to the original. Then I laid them out on the original fuselage plans to make sure it was a similar length. I had some spare fiberglass tent poles that I used for the booms. They weren’t super light but were all I had at the time.

Once I build the wing and tail I tried out how far forward the battery would need to be to get the right center of gravity (CG). The final length would be even longer as a pusher motor on the back would try and move the CG backwards.

I laid outthe motor and prop to make sure it wouldn’t hit the booms. I wanted the motor quite far away from the wing to try and make it quieter.

The FPV camera could point forward right from the nose with no propellor in the way.

I also added a 1m strip of WS2812 LEDs inside the wing to light up at night.

Fuselage

I didn’t really like cutting the channels to make a fuselage (a la Flite Test) and I had a nice 3d printed bevel cutting tool. So I thought I could use bevel cuts and it turned out great. I made it just the right size to fit a 3d printed motor mount. Luckily it was also just big enough for a 2200mAh 3S LiPo battery.

As you can see it came together really well and I feel this might actially be stronger than the traditional A or B fold that Flite Test uses. Of course it only works well because the bevel cutting tool makes it so easy.

The fuselage length needed to be very long in the end. It looks pretty comical and I was kinda disappointed in that. I made the top of the fuselage open up to put the battery in (The wires from the speed controller almost weren’t long enough). Then you slide the nose of the plane on and it seals the battery lid.

servo testing USB cable

I put a simple 2 pin connector onto an old USB cable and tah dah I instantly had 5V power easily available.

This plugs in nicely to my battery/servo tester and was much easier than digging out a speed controller to get 5V.

Wheels

I made some wheels from some old hot chocolate lids and some 2mm wire. I got the idea for the wire bend from this post

even with the huge wheels it didn’t quite keep the prop off the ground, but I was sure it would help.

Final Weights (everything but a battery):

607g with landing gear
555g no landing gear
587g with fpv (no landing gear)

Maiden Flight

First Landing

In the end I didn’t like the wheels. Thet looked silly in the air and make it even more sliugish. I didn’t love how it flew (and certainly didn’t love how it looked) but at least it flew. A good first plane that I feel like I designed.

Lighting McQueen JB Simple stick

2021-01-19T00:00:00-08:00

Each plane I build i seem to like more than the other. I loved the slow and stable Storch more than my first plane. The Versa was fast and zippy. The Hangar Simple Stick flew like an arrow, fast precise and very fun to fly. We’re not going to mention the P47 for some time yet.

When I set out to build my simple stick I really wanted to build the Flite test one but even though they had it in the store the plans were not available yet. There were two choices for other easily findable simple stick planes. The Hangar and the JB. I built the hangar one since it looked way simpler. I was intrigued with the JB one since it looked more like the Flite test plane and had a symmetric wing. A symmetric wing would fly equally well right side as well as upside down.

So I cut it all out and started building it. This time I even remembered to put neopixel LEDs into the wing.

I can control the exact color of each little LED individually. So these two on each wing tip can be a different color.

I don’t have a great setup for controlling the LEDs yet so I just plugged in the board that powered up my xmas tree so here’s how that color scheme looks inside a plane. I put a ring of lights around the motor which looks super sweet in the shiny metal casing. There’s lights down the left and right of the body at the tail with a single LED pointing directly backwards. Finally there’s a short strip under the front of the fuselage. I used the regular LED connectors that came with the strips which ended up being a bit bulky in the end.

I still have no idea what I’m doing with landing gear so I built this skid like thing with survey flag wire. All I’m really trying to do is save the prop when I come in for a landing. I also added a 2mm carbon rod into the leading edge of the wing on the inside of the bevel cut to hopefully stop the wings folding. I didn’t like the servos for the tail sticking out of the body on my Hangar simple stick so for this one I put in a few guide tubes and ran control rods to servos mounted inside the body as far forward as possible. It looked really tidy from the outside.

The Maiden when really well, it flew really nicely and I even flew it up high and did some inverted flying and it flew well upside down.

The First Landing also went well with the kooky landing gear helping to keep the prop in one piece.

This JB Simple Stick with all the LEDs ended up weighing 495g without battery. For comparison my Hangar simple stick once I’d added the old tent pole to reinforce the wing after folding weighed 460g.

I really liked the smooth lines of the top of the plane, the wing being recessed into the fuselage is a nice look. The bottom of the tail is also flush with the fuselage which is another thing I like but maybe makes it more likely to be damaged during landing? Many of the cuts in the plans, especially at the front ended with cutting away and removing 10mm of foam from the paper, then you would glue and fold over the paper flap to cover up the exposed foam edge, this ended up looking really nice but was a bit annoying to make. The chord of the wing (leading to trailing edge distance) seemed really large compared to the hangar but I measured it and it was actually the same.

The biggest drawback with this plane is how annoying it is to change the battery. You need to take the wing off and I still don’t feel comfortable with less than 4 elastic bands (2 parallel with the fuselage and then 2 crossing). Taking the wing off means it’s still connected for the ailerons so it’s hard to deal with. With my Hangar simple stick I was able to make the top of the front of the fuse slide under between the wing and the BBQ skewer that held the elastic bands. It got a little worn over time but it made battery changes super simple.

I’m also not a fan of the tail and rudder being split like they are with part of the rudder moving the top of the tail.

Disaster

And then we had a bit of a whoopsie. I’d walked up to where we fly and because I walked I only brought one plane. Well I get the battery in and decide to check the control surfaces and the elevator was barely moving at all. I could hear the servo moving inside but the elevator didn’t. I took the wing off (which is annoying to do) and saw that the servo inside had pulled the paper off where it was glued and was flopping around. I should have gone home, but instead I taped the servo in place and figured it was good enough. It was good enough for a while, but then my plane suddenly dipped down while I was flying overhead and slammed at full throttle right into the side of a shipping container. It made the loudest bang!

I was impressed with how little damage seemed to happen. The 3D printed motor mount died and one of the neopixels fell off the motor ring but the motor looks like it might still work. There was a bit of a dent in the tail end of the fuselage, it seems weaker than the Hanger stick. You can see where the servos came off the side of the fuselage I’ll have to work out a better mounting system when I fix this.

I haven’t put it all back together yet but it looks really fixable and I’m hopeful I’ll get it to fly again.

Christmas Cards

2020-12-17T00:00:00-08:00

Every year we send out a sheet of photos and our Christmas letter with our cards. I figure I might as well document it here:

To make the photo montage sheet I use a program called Comic Life. It’s super easy to use. I make the boxes then drop photos inside them. I can then scale the photos and they never grow outside the box. The paper was a harder problem. Regular photo paper is too thick, hard to fold and sometimes gets my cards sent back with insufficient postage. I found this lightweight photo paper that works well. You can also just make your image and hand it over to someone like shutterfly for them to mail it out which really would make things a lot simpler but doesn’t seem very personal to me.

I write the letter part as a group effort with the family, we can each edit and add our own flair to it.

I just use a google sheet for address labels. I add a column so I can sort them in furthest away first so those get sent first. The avery online label maker does a good job of mail merge from a csv file.

Finally I make a google drive folder named after the year under “Xmas Cards” where I put all the files for this year. I put both the original files and also the final print pdf files too.

P47 Thunderbolt and charging box

2020-11-19T00:00:00-08:00

Here’s a sad story. I decided to try and build a pretty plane. I was going to build a FT Mustang but they said that the P47 would be easier.

The wing went together easily. I used particle board for the wood spars.

The curvy part of the body was kind of annoying to bend and fix in place. There’s a few creases but it’s not awful.

All finished and ready for paint. My plans had a problem where one side of the motor mount was 5mm too high so it wasn’t square, I just crammed it in anyway and it kind fit. Also one of the sections behind that flared engine cowling was the wrong size and so wouldn’t fit. Both of those were the first time I’d had problems with plans and it was pretty frustrating.

I’ve had problems with this cheap spray paint clogging in the tube (not the nozzzle), but since I’ve been shaking them up with a reciprocating saw I’ve not had any trouble at all. It’s just a pipe clamp and an old long saw blade. I did have grand plans to affix a bike water bottle cage to it, but this clamp was so wasy and worked well.

I found this p47 livery which looked easy enough to paint. The black paint kinda bubbled the paper off the foam but it worked out o.k.

painting the top took quite a few coats of paint.

The complete plane. I used black paint on the windows, a Sharpie wasn’t dark enough.

The underside looks really good.

I just used a sharpie pen on the white foamboard to make the cowling checkerboard. It was time consuming but not particularly difficult.

Here’s where our story turns sad, the maiden flight. Looking at the video it didn’t fly as bad as I remember, but it certainly didn’t fly well. It’s likely it was too tail heavy, or overall just too heavy with the weight of all the paint.

I think the final crash was caused by the elevator splitting at the thin bit under the rudder which lost me half that control surface. It smashed pretty hard nose first into the ground and shoved the motor further back into the plane. I haven’t fixed it up for flown it since. I might have a go at it sometime again.

Charging box

I also built a box for charging my batteries. I got this Fire retardant steel box which was only $22 when I bought it. Maybe set up an amazon price watch? Cut a small hole in the back corner and put rubber grommets to protect the wires. I’m under no illusion that this is completely fire proof, but it’ll help. I still keep the batteries in the lipo bags when chaging which helps hold the temperature sensor on my b6 charger.

The parallel charging board is glued down and makes plugging in batteries easy. I don’t actually use it to charge more than one battery at a time. I didn’t notice the Deans T plug on the bottom, and cut off a supplied Deans to BEC type connector to make an XT60 to BEC, oops. The other wires are for charging various bike lights. I color code the plugs and the batteries so I use the right charger. The bottom is coated in duct tape to try and reduce the chance of things shorting. After flying this box is large enough to store all the batteries that need charging and after I’ve charged each battery I move it to a 50-Caliber Ammo Box.

Sticky McStickFace my first Simple Stick

2020-11-07T00:00:00-08:00

I made a Hangar Simple Stick! Mine was slightly different because I didn’t have any long wire for a control rod so I put the servos further back in the tail. This adjusted the CG so I had to move the wing 1” back to compensate.

The googly eyes really helped with the CG and give it personality. I didn’t use a Flite Test power pod (removable motor tray), I just glued in a 3D printed motor mount (Thanks Ernst!). Changing the battery required taking off the wings AND pulling up the bit with the eyes on. It’s pretty annoying. Once the plane got a bit more “worn in” (i.e. crashed). I just stared tucking the eye bit under the wing.

I burned through quite a few propellers since it’s right at the front and I didn’t have any landing gear at all. I put these skids on made from flag stakes and it helped quite a bit.

This plane is the funnest to fly of all my planes so far. It’s very quick to move and flights in a very straight line. just point it and it keeps going. It will fly straight up and climb until it’s just a teeny dot and then you can glide down for ages under no power. It’s so maneuverable that it felt like it could do anything. Well, not quite, I put it in a full throttle, full speed dive and then pull out of it at the last moment and promptly folded the wings. I’ll admit I didn’t have a popsicle stick to make them stronger but I don’t think it would have helped. It flew great even with the wings folded and when I got it safely to ground I was able to fix it by sliding an old fiber glass tent pole inside the wing. You can see it in this photo.

The tent pole weighs 41g. I could use an old aluminum arrow shaft which would only be 10.7g. With the tent pole the plane weighs 460g with everything but a battery.

Here’s some video of the Maiden Flight.

I’ve flown this a lot, it fits easily on my backpack and is nice and quiet and fun to fly. I’ve also crashed it A LOT and it’s stood up to the beating especially well. We’ve done streamer battles with this and the Storch and even had a midair collisions and flown away from it like nothing happened.

The biggest drawbacks are how often I break a prop and also changing batteries is kind of annoying.

Rating Music in iTunes on iOS

2020-10-17T00:00:00-07:00

History

You can skip down to my current solution to find out how I currently do it if you don’t want to read this boring bit.

In the olden days when I used to take the bus to work I would rate my music on an iPod Photo. I rated them using this scale

0 stars - not yet rated
1 star - terrible, I should delete this song
2 stars - I don’t like this song but should keep it - maybe for a complete album
3 stars - I don’t hate it, but I’d be fine if I never heard it again. worth listening to when listening to a whole album or all works by an artist.
4 stars - should be featured on a best of a genre, best of a musician.
5 stars - absolute banger, I would always listen to this song.

Then I could make playlists of 4 stars and above and they’d be sure to be great music to listen to.

In hindsight I should probably stretch it more so that 3 stars and above was the threshold then I could be a little more granular with my ratings.

Once all my music was rated, keeping it updated when new stuff was added was easy. Then I wanted a way to know if music was safe for work or not, i.e. it had rude words or questionable topics. I took all my 5 star music and added it to a manual playlist called was 5 star and then made a smart playlist that had the rules playlist is "was 5 star" and rating is ***** then I went through that and all songs that were safe for work got rated 4 stars and those that had rude words in them were rated 3 stars. Finally I made my way through the songs and could then manually go and sort my was 5 star playlist by rating and add all the 3 stars to my NSFW playlist and the 4 stars to SFW and when I was finally done I could put everything back to 5 stars. Then I worked through the 4 star songs genre by genre. It took a while but I was just sat on the bus commuting anyway and it helped me discover some songs in my library I’d forgotten about.

Eventually I got an iPhone and using that was a little easier. Then I finally worked out that I could both rate songs with stars and also mark if I loved or disliked songs with the heart thing. So now I could rate them in the star rating and use hearts and dislikes to rate as Safe for Work and Not Safe for Work. I’d later grab the hearts and add to SFW and the dislikes into my NSFW playlist and then reset them.

Then I relized I could do this using Siri on bike rides although it was a little annoying. I’d have to say “I like this song”, then I’d say “rate this song 5 stars”, then I’d have the press the remote button (to turn off siri) and tben double press it to move to the next song. Each step could go wrong and I’d have to work out what was happening, but I was able to rate my music, as long as I had internet access where I was riding.

Finally I discovered shortcuts this allowed me to make a shortcut that would rate a song and make it as NSFW or SFW and then move to the next song. Of course it wasn’t as easy as that. There were no shortcut actions to rate a song. I ddin’t want to sync my whole NSFW and SFW playlists either. Also empty playlists don’t sync to my phone either. This all led me to the… You can also run the shortcuts using the phone app and pressing big buttons on the screen. This works even if you don’t have internet access. Sometimes the music doesn’t start playing when you move to the next track when you do it this way, so you have to explicitly start the music once you move to the next track.

Current Solution

I have a system that works but it’s ugly. I made 5 playlists with a small song in it called __ (one playlist for each star rating) called “zp 1” to “zp 5”. I also made 2 playlists “zp rude” and “zp safe” with similar small __ songs on them. Finally I made a “zp Needs Work” for me to deal with songs that might have the wrong genre or I had mistated.

I then make 5 shortcuts that adds the current song to the right rating playlist and the SFW list and another 5 that did the ratings and added it to the NSFW list. It then moves to the next song and makes sure it is playing.

Then after my phone has synced to my mac at home. I run a python script that takes all the songs (except the small __ one) and rates them and removes them from the playlists. Then I need to sync again. I need to leave the small song there so the playlist ends up on my phone (empty playlists are not synced).

Here’s the script you might need to pip3 install appscript

I told you it was ugly, but it does work.

If you don’t mind having those playlists around you could do the script stuff by hand occasionally.

I had to have a unique title for each shortcut that was not likley to be confused with something else. Tryone came about because I used to try and call Traffic Info and it would always try and call Patrick which was annoying when stuck in traffic on the highway. The format of the naming is Tyrone rating safe/rude. I changed the rating word depending on if it is safe or rude to further reduce the risk is the phone just fudging a guess since I’m riding my bike when yelling this into the mic. I also changed the reply to amuse me and get confirmation of where it is added. If it adds the track to the wrong list the order in which I add things in my script allows you to upgrade tracks to a higher rating or making sure they are NSFW. If anything is screwed up you can always “Tyrone Later” and it’ll get added to the Needs Work playlist to be updated at your leisure. Here’s the order I have them in on my phone. SFW are colored Greena nd NSFW are colored Red, the ordering allows me to easily see where I am in the list depending on how many red/green ones I can see.

Shortcut	Rating	(not) safe for work	reply
Tryone Banger Safe	5	SFW	Banger!
Tryone Good Safe	4	SFW	Good!
Tryone 3 Safe	3	SFW	Meh
Tryone 5 Rude	5	NSFW	Fookin’ A!
Tryone 4 Rude	4	NSFW	The Sheet!
Tryone 3 Rude	3	NSFW	Mediocre
Tryone 2 Safe	2	SFW	Bad
Tryone 2 Rude	2	NSFW	Shyte
Tryone 1 Safe	1	SFW	Awful
Tryone 1 Rude	1	NSFW	Foo kin awful

Bonus: I added two more actions called “Jesus Christ” and “Hail Satan” that allow me to mark if a song is overly religious or not (especially for Xmas music).

Versa wing and FPV

2020-10-16T00:00:00-07:00

FPV

I’ve wanted to try First-person view (FPV) flying. You put a camera and a transmitter on your plane and see what the plane sees via a screen or goggles. If the goggles support head tracking you can even put the camera on a gimbal with some servos and as you look left and right so does the camera! Maybe one day I’ll get a set of sky03o goggles but for now of course I went with the cheap option which is the $38 ROTG02 and that included a little camera with a transmitter too.

I can plug this into an old Android phone and it looks to Android just like a plug in webcam. Add in the go FPV app and it works perfectly. I did put a strap on an old Google cardboard and even added some padding but then I found you can buy better VR phone holders for around $10 on eBay so I got a Tzumi Dream Vision Pro

They make your eyes look goofy when you look in where the phone goes. You can adjust th lenses left right and focus them forward and backward, I was impressed.

I wanted the camera to point forward but my propensity for slamming the plane nose first into the ground stopped me putting it on the nose of the plane. I chose to mount it here which was a spectacularly bad idea.

I got out to fly and have the goggles on my head ready to go, launch the plane get it up nice and high and I’m gliding around and then put the goggles on and it’s pretty amazing. It’s a little static-y but then again it’s only a 25mW transmitter and I have no idea at all how high the plane is, it’s so hard to work that out just by seeing what the plane sees. I’m worried the plane is getting too low and so I turn on the throttle to climb and instantly the screen turns to all static. Now the problem with FPV is that dumb old you with your nerd goggles on is stood in a field looking one way, but the plane could be anywhere around you and I had to rip the goggles off then in a panic look around and see if I could find my plane before it flew away too far and I couldn’t see it. I did this a few times but it was too nerve wracking for me.

I think for a while I’ll only be flying FPV with someone else on a buddy box to bring the plane back or just have them look at the footage. After my first battery I decided that I would use the recording capability and just record some video for you, but when I plugged in the camera it started to make the magic overheating electric components smell and melting the foam on my plane so I quickly unplugged it and figured I’d just blown up the camera and transmitter anyway. Strangely when I got home it seemed to work fine, but the wires were certainly all melty.

Finally my battery meter came in and on a recent flight I managed to get 30 minutes of flying from one 3s 2200 battery. I try and climb and then glide as much as possible but when I finally landed the battery was at 8%. It’s not good to drain LiPo batteries that low so I don’t think I’ll be flying for quite that long on a single battery again. I used to fly for 20 minutes at a time, maybe I’ll bump that up to 25.

Here’s the FT Storch finally all finished and ready to fly, We taxied it up and down the street a little but we didn’t take off. Those wheels are made out of Costco cat litter jugs. Still not maidened it yet hopefully soon.

Versa wing

My second Flite Test foam board plane build was a Versa Wing but as a pusher (with the motor on the back). It went together really easily and it was mostly finished after one day of working on it. I cut out way too much from the plans since they had me cut holes for the servos on the bottom, but for a pusher you want the servos on the top and I feel like I could leave the bottom half of the paper in for the spar holes. I also think I’ll fold and glue the spars before I cut the rest of the spars which should make them more even. My next Versa is going to be so clean looking!

I built my own motor mount using thick and thin paint stirrer wood and some wood glue. It feels like it’s strong enough, time will tell. My friend also printed me up some motor mounts so I’m excited to try those.

I got a little too rushed when I built it and totally forgot to put in the WS2812 LED strips I had planned to add. Oh well. since it’s only $2 of foam board I can build a new one anytime. I’m very pleased with how tidy the motor mount is.

The battery fits right in the front and we’ll see if it manages to stay in there with all that Velcro. You can also see the holes that the wing spars fit into. I think I can leave the foam board paper in place and make that much tidier in the next version. Also those center of gravity holes are huge and ugly but I didn’t know what the hole was for when I was making it from the plans. I also want to add FPV to this as well, but the camera and TX that I bought are reserved for the Mini AR Wing that I’ll talk about in another post.

RC Plane workbench, usb power input, crashes, wireless buddy box, foamboard storch

2020-10-05T00:00:00-07:00

AXN Floater

My adventures with my AXN Floater plane continue. I never glued the wings in so that it’d be easier to transport but that means that they sometimes get a bit loose and it doesn’t fly as well as it could (understatement). I’ve read about putting velcro on either side but for now this elastic band is working pretty well. It hums when it’s soaring without the engine but it works.

Also I’ve been crashing a lot. An awful lot. This plane is tough but I’ve certainly pushed it past its limit. It broke here twice and I’ve been fixing it with gorilla glue. It breaks here because there is a carbon spar along that tail and this is where it ends. Next time I think I’m going to reinforce it with bamboo skewers or crabon rods if they ever arrive in time.

I’ve also started building up what I bring with me when I go flying. These tape rolls are a nice compact way to bring a lot of different types of tape with me.

workbench for foam plane building

I was excited to build some planes out of dollar store foam board. I’ve watched so many flite test videos and I knew I’d need more desk space. I also needed something I could put away easily to free up space to work on my bike. I came up with this closet door workbench.

It’s made out of an old closet door so it’s very light (but not that strong). I screwed in some wood screws to the end and cut off the heads and drilled corresponding holes in the edge of that blue work bench. I put a hinged piece of wood on the end for a leg and held it in place with a window sash lock.

I also used the same sash locks to hold it to my workbench.

It’s pretty stable and gives me a nice large workspace. I mounted an outlet strip underneath for my glue gun and put some hardboard on the top to protect the surface. When I’m done stores neatly behind the garage door into the house.

Flysky transmitter upgrades

I’d seen a few posts where people had upgraded the power supply for their transmitter so I added this little USB port to the top. If I need to I can take the batteries out and power my transmitter with a usb power pack. It’s not ideal but it might come in useful. I’ve found I get pretty good battery life out of Eneloop AA batteries.

Here’s how that usb port is connected to the battery terminals.

I built my own buddy box cable out of an old s-video cable which was kind of annoying to try and use. It felt fragile and was annoying to be tied to someone else. I also thought about how easy it was to get rid of the cable and make my flight simulator work wirelessly so I experimented with using the same receiver as a buddy box and it worked great.

Here’s a picture of how I did the testing. I used a Flysky FS-A8S but you could also use a FS RX2A if you don’t mind soldering some wires.

I then connected it all up with a switch and hot glued it into place inside the case. I really should drill a little viewing port so you can see if the receiver is on or not, but meh. There’s also no way to bind a new transmitter without opening the case. I guess I could drill a hole to get to the bind button but it’s something I’d do so rarely I don’t even care about it.

Both the USB port and switch look o.k. from the outside.

Flite Test Storch

Here’s our almost finished Flite Test FT Storch, it was a good learning experience building it with my daughter. It certainly looks plane-y. The motor is the 1000KV 30A one from here which was $11.14 shipped when I got it. We’ve not yet flown it so I’ll report back when we have.

RC Plane

2020-08-20T00:00:00-07:00

I got an rc plane! This is the perfect time to talk about it because I haven’t actually flown it yet so I don’t have any bad news about totally destroying it the very first time I try to fly. It all started on a camping trip where a friend brought along his Volantex 759-3 Phoenix 2400 which looked pretty sweet. It’s a sailplane/glider so it uses the engine to get up high and then you can turn it off and glide it down. I really like the idea of that because I find drones and model airplanes annoying with their constant whining engines.

When I got back from the trip I looked up the plane and it was sold out everywhere I found. I figured I’m not in a hurry I can wait until it comes back in stock and in the meantime I orderd a Flysky FS-i6X Transmitter with iA6B Receiver, usb simlualtor adapter and a Flysky FS-A8S receiver so I’d be ready for when I do finally get it. Plus this will allow me to fly a simulator on my computer using the same transmitter I’d be flying with. I also ordered a battery charger although I think I should have got this USB-C based charger. I decided when it came to ordering batteries I’d get them closer to the time from somewhere more local than coming all the way from China.

I went with the Flysky since it was cheap, but seemed good enough. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a Spectrum or FrSky if I wasn’t going to stick with this. If I was going to stick with it having a spare controller wouldn’t be a bad thing. So far I’ve been perfectly happy with the FS-i6X. I was tempted by the i6S which looked way sleeker and modern, but I’m glad I didn’t because I’ve since learned that it doesn’t have easy ways to adjust the trim which would have been a real pain. the FS-i6S is really for controlling drones.

Eventually it all arrived and the plane still hadn’t become available yet. So I set up the simulator on my mac. There’s virtually zero choice for the mac and so I ended up getting Aerofly RC7 from the App store. I could have got version 8 ($124), but 7 ($40) seemed like it had enough for me, plus it seems like I can just spend the $85 price difference to upgrade later if I want. Make sure you get Aerofly RC and not Aerofly FS. It instantly recognized the USB simulator adapter and when I plugged the long cable into my transmitter it worked and I was crashing planes in no time. The goal was to be able to use the transmitter without the cable so I plugged the FS-A8S reciver into the USB adapter and finally got that to work. I had to pull out the white sbus wire and replace it with the yellow ppm wire. I used a long 3 pin header to connect the two servo connectors. Then I had to go into settings on my controller and make sure it was set for ppm output. Then it all worked! Now I can Airplay from my iMac to my AppleTV and sit on the couch and play airplanes at my leisure. I’ve been really impressed with the simulator, it’s been great to train my muscle memory for flying.

I wasted quite a lot of time trying to upgrade the firmware on my transmitter with my mac. I’ve not yet found a way to do it. This i6x bugfix and pinouts page leads me to believe I may want to find a windows machine to finally update this at some point. The i6 Transmitter justs shows up as one of two USB serial port variants, but the i6X has its own usb device ID (even in flashing firmware mode) that I couldn’t get to show up as a serial port. If I ever get it to work on my mac I’d probably use this golang based flysky updater maybe to flash flyplus if there’s a i6X verison or the bugfix i6X firmware above. Even this flyplus with a mac page didn’t help.

At some point if we ever end up with two Flysky transmitters (or make friends) I’d like to make a buddy box cable That’d be good for flying with my daughter.

So I’m crashing in the simulator worryingly frequently and I’m checking the pages for a Phoenix glider (PNP not Kit) and it’s always out of stock and I’m getting impatient and I notice this H-King AXN Floater Jet 1280mm (50.4) PNF is on sale for $64 and I figure for that price I can get it and learn to fly with it and get the Phoenix when it’s finally available. I order the plane. I almost got two and kind of wish I had for that price. I also got a couple of ZIPPY Compact 2200mAh 3s 40c Lipo battery Packs and Lipo Bags which I learned I should use to store the batteries for safety. I also picked up some spare 5.5x5.5 props because I was getting free shipping anyway. Ordering from HobbyKing was easy, but I always had to remember to search for in stock and in the USA store which limited choices a little bit.

I also picked up the following stuff that’d take forever to come in but would likely be useful so that I’d have it at some point in the future.

servo tester
XT60 connectors
battery tester
ammo box for storing batteries for extra sfaety.

While I was waiting I watched a bunch of videos about this new plane I’d just bought and found it it’s a lot of people’s favorite plane and especially good for beginners. That was lucky! The push prop on top/back meant I was less likely to damage it in crashes and landings which seemed like a good idea.

H-King AXN Overview & Maiden
AXN Clouds Fly Floater Jet RC plane build video (part 1 of 3)
My AXN Floater RC plane setup.
AXN Floater-Jet
HobbyKing AXN Floater - the perfect trainer?
Hobby King AXN Clouds Fly Floater Jet Build This video is full of bad advice like gluing the stabilizers without threading in the control wire don’t follow that advice!

My plane finally arrived and I set to doing the few steps to put it together.

Mine arrived with the servo horns pointing away from the center line and the wires scrarching at the foam side of the plane. I swapped them over so they were in the center of the plane like in the picture. This made the push/pull wire much less likely to bind. I also slit the foam a little bit and inserted a cut up amazon gift card which will hold the battery in place. Time will tell if this was a good idea or not.

I had to tape a large bolt to the front of the battery to move the CG (Center of Gravity) forward to the right place.

battery installed and held in place with the gift card.

I initially installed the push rod upside down in this control horn so it came into the top of the horn rather than the bottom as pictured below. Fixing that was a little tricky, but I was able to bend the end of the rod to pop it out of the horn and then fix it. Now the line is much straighter to the servo and less likely to bind.

Sheer luck meant I got the elevator rod in correctly first time.

Lots of the videos talked about a propsaver on the motor and how they replaced it with a collet, but mine came with the collet. The motor being on the top meant a prop saver would be less important.

I put some duct tape on the aileron servos to hold them in place and used red/green to indicate left and right. Hopefylly this’ll help me see if the plane is inverted or not which was a problem I had with the simulator. I did not glue the wings in, but did hold them in place with the blue painters tape. I might want to move from the y splitter to individual channels for the ailerons so I can try and use them as flaps. I also put packing tape on the bottom of the fuselage to protect it during landing.

This little hook on the wall holds the plane really well.

I protected the leading edge of the horizontal stabilizer with packing tape so the mount wouldn’t damage it.

Here’s some pages with more reading about the AXN plane.

AXN Clouds Fly - ivc wiki - amazing resource
RC Groups thread
AXN Floater Jet. FliteTest Forum

Portable Fizzy Water

2020-08-10T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve posted before about my fizzy water setup at home. On average I’ve been making almost 4 liters of fizzy a day now I’m mostly at home and it’s been great. But while I’m away I really miss my fizzy. Especially on biking trips which tend to be to dry hot areas like Utah and Arizona.

One solution is the sweet Glass Soda Siphon I was using before I got the big co2 tank. It uses 8g soda chargers which are sorta cheap and will do about 1.5L per charger, but the water isn’t very fizzy, fades really quickly and the glass is heavy, fragile and easy to get very dirty when camping.

If I could 3D print an adapter to put that soda siphon head onto a 2L soda bottle, that might work.

One day I saw this Keg co2 charger, and this portable keg charger and that piqued my interest but it used larger co2 units. Which reminded me I already had a CO2 inflater for my bike tires. Then I found this Adding a Schrader Valve to a Homebrew Keg which would connect nicely to my CarbaCap and thus I put together this:

It worked great!

The CO2 units are pretty expensive, but I have quite a few left over from various trips and finding them on the trails. The digital pressure guage allows me to keep the pressure consistent which I feel is important. The digital one was only a few dollars more expensive than an analog one.

It was a fun little project. If I was doing it again, I’d probably go for this MRbrew Keg Charger which seems to tick all the boxes in a more compact, lighter unit for cheaper.