With the parts arrived we can start building the quadcopter. The goal is to build it as light (and as cheap) as possible.

For the frame I use a 20×20mm aluminum U profile hold together by some plywood. The ‘landing gear’ is made by fixing ‘alpex’ tubes into the U profile.

The brushless DC motors come as a set and need to be assembled before attaching them to the frame. On top we’ll need the part that holds the propeller and on the bottom a mounting plate to fix the motor to the frame. Also the bullet connectors need to be soldered to the wiring.

Only two screws are used to fix the motors to the frame. The future will tell whether that’s enough to hold the motors. We don’t attach the propellers at this point. We need to make sure the software is functioning correctly first to avoid damage to the quadcopter, your house, human beings or other animals.

After assembling the frame and fixing the motors the electronics can be installed. The ESC’s are tightly fixed to the arms of the frame. The arms of the quadcopter will function as a heatsink.

The controller board is placed in the center of the quadcopter, with the white arrow on the circuit board pointing to the front. Since the default firmware is for a ‘+’ configuration, it’s mounted with the arrow pointing to one of the four motors. The receiver for the radio controlling (RX) is also fixed to one of the arms.

Next is connecting the Electronic Speed Controllers and the RX to the controller board. 4 motors and 4 RX channels have to be connected.

Radio connections:

Motor/ESC connections:

Of course the quadcopter will need some electric juice. I use simple 1.5mm² plug connectors to connect the ESC’s to the battery. The ESC’s support BEC (Battery eliminator circuit). This means the control board is powered by the ESC’s. The control board on it’s turn powers the radio receiver module.

With everything assembled it’s time for tuning and a maiden flight. Fingers crossed.

A quadcopter is a multicopter with four propellers which is in fact it’s a helicopter with multiple propellers. This setup makes it much easier to build and to fly than a regular helicopter.
By regulating the power to the propellers the quadcopter can move in any direction you want. The electronics of the quadcopter, including a gravity sensor, ensure a stable flight.

Building a Quadcopter

Although it might seem rocket science to some people iets not that hard to build a quadcopter. A lot of diy people successfully build one, so why shouldn’t you?
To make it possible to build a DIY quadcopter for almost everyone we’ll write a detailed build log of our own quadcopter. These are the steps required to build your quadcopter:

1. Get informed (you’re here, well done!)
2. Make a parts list, or use ours
3. Put it all together
4. Load the software
5. Learn to fly

In addition to these essential steps you can pimp your quadcopter by tuning the software, adding camera’s to the quadcopter and other exciting modifications.

Quadcopter Parts List

First things first, let’s shop! I paid €230 for the shopping list below including the shipping cost to Belgium. As you will notice I ordered a spare motor and ESC. You never know…

And now…it’s time to wait…for a package…will be continued!

But sometimes things doesn’t do what you want them to do. Most of the time this behavior  isn’t caused by a bug but just how it was designed to work. Changing the css ‘display’ property of one element to none causes other elements to change their behavior. For example bottom margins of headers located above a hidden element are affected.

Often we don’t have a clue why animations become jumpy and the only solution is to strip down css code until the animation works. Today I spend several hours to remove the jump from an expandable menu created with nested lists.

The lists and links are pretty much styled  so there were a lot possible reasons for the jump. After trying to add and remove some css I decided to give all elements a colored border to make paddings and margins visible. And guess what, it didn’t help me to find the cause of the jumpy jQuery animation because after adding the borders the animation was smooth! Since the menu has a plain white background I changed the colors of the borders to #FFF.

Of course it doesn’t make sense to give every element a border. After removing borders and testing the result only the nested <ul> elements were required to have a border. A stripped down version of the menu looks like this:


<ul>
<li><a href="">Group 1</a>
<ul style="border:1px solid #FFF;">
<li><a href="">Link 1</a></li>
<li><a href="">Link 2</a></li>
<li><a href="">Link 3</a></li>
</ul></li>
<li><a href="">Group 2</a>
<ul style="border:1px solid #FFF;">
<li><a href="">Link 1</a></li>
<li><a href="">Link 2</a></li>
<li><a href="">Link 3</a></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>


The menu above might work without the borders, because a lot of style has been removed.

AdChoices

Why AdChoices doesn’t work (for me)

Although it might work for a certain public for me I don’t think it will ever work. Last week I ordered a GoPro HERO camera. A very nice and compact HD camera that can be used in ‘hard’ conditions. Under water, in the air, outer space,…

As I said, I ordered it, I bought one, I have one and I don’t need a second one. Every site with AdChoices is showing me ads for the GoPro HERO.

Beside the fact that I’m not interested in buying another camera, displaying 3 times the same ad isn’t pretty smart. I was downloading FileZilla, trying to sell me some web hosting would have been more appropriate.

Why we don’t like AdChoices

Not only it is displaying ads I’m not interested in it also violates our privacy. Imagine: you’re looking for a new job, you check your private mails from time to time at your office desk. The next day you’re searching some information related to your job (together with a college or your boss) and all you see is ads about new job opportunities, not relevant to the content of the page you’re visiting.

Giving a surprise party will become impossible with AdChoices!

Beside the privacy issue, the revenue of the publishers will lower. I’m not going to click on ads of a camera when I’m looking for a ftp client. These ads are irrelevant and at that time I’m not interested in them.

Update: Still bored by AdChoices

There are some apps out there that will create the images for you and that will tag you in the right order so the pictures are shown on the banner of your Facebook profile. Most of them will however not give you the opportunity to keep a nice thumbnail picture. And they leave a message on your wall that they created the images, pretty creative huh?

That’s why it’s better to just do it yourself. It’s fun. I used Adobe Fireworks to do this (yeah, once upon a time I started using it and I’m still…). Of course Photoshop will do the trick too. Follow these steps to get you going:

1. Take a screenshot of your Facebook profile
2. Paste it in a layer and cut out the banner pictures and your profile picture. The profile picture can be pretty high. Make it high enough so there’s room for a regular Facebook profile picture.
3. Make slices for every piece. These are the dimensions that worked for me: profile picture 180×540 and the images in the Facebook banner 97×68 pixels.
4. Create a layer under the cut out Facebook screenshot and paste your picture.
5. Position your picture and export the slices.
6. Upload your profile picture to Facebook.
7. Upload the banner pictures to a new album.
8. Open last image of the album (the most right one) and tag yourself.
9. Now tag yourself on the banner images from right to left.
10. Have a look. Sweet!

If you have a nice picture laying around you’re done in half an hour of pure fun and creativity :).

When the PLC needs to be accessible over a router making it possible to browse to the web interface from everywhere on the internet there are some settings in the router and the PLC that need to be correct.

On the router a NAT row needs to be added to forward port 80 and 443 to the PLC address. Port 80 is for the http pages port 443 is needed to access secure pages over https.

In the PLC it is absolutely required to set the router IP address. When this isn’t set the webserver the  S7-1200 PLC will be accessible over the local network but not over the router.

Don’t forget to change the password of the PLC. Allowing access to the PLc over internet can be usefull but also very dangerous when not secure.

Also it’s not recommended to enable the webserver on a S7-1200 PLC if it’s not necessary. A DOS (Denial Of Service) attack can make the PLC crash!

A big drawback of the original firmware (V1) is the lack of an integrated webserver, certainly the fact that it’s impossible to download a program in run and that all data blocks return to the initial values after a download.

These problems are solved when upgrading the S7-1200 PLC firmware to V2.1.2. To do this update a 24MB Siemens memory card is required. Compared to the PLC this is an expensive little piece that will only be used for updating the firmware of the S7-1200 PLC. Unfortunately there is no way around this. You absolutely need this memory card to update the firmware!

Before updating the firmware be sure you update your installation of TIA portal to the latest version and Service Pack. You can find some updates on the Siemens support website:

http://support.automation.siemens.com/WW/view/en/28919804/

Download the latest Firmware for you PLC (for me it is the 1212C) from the Siemens website:

http://support.automation.siemens.com/WW/view/en/38710101/

After downloading the firmware execute the file to extract the firmware to the empty memory card. A folder “FWUPDATE.S7S” and a file “S7_JOB.S7S” are extracted to the root folder of the memory card.

Now we’re prepared for the actual firmware upgrade of the S7-1200 PLC. The following steps are required to perform this update:

1. Insert the memory card in the PLC. The status goes to stop. And the  maintenance LED blinks.
2. Power cycle the PLC. After this the firmware is copied to the internal memory. The RUN/STOP alternates between green and orange.
3. When the copying process is done the LEDS will look like this: RUN/STOP LED is orange, maintenance LED blinks.
4. Remove the Memory Card from the  PLC and again do a power cycle to load the new firmware.
5. With the upgrade to version 2.0.3 my PLC didn’t go to run by itself, use TIA portal to get the PLC back in RUN mode when necessary. After the upgrade the firmware version 2.1.2 the PLC went to RUN.
6. Enjoy the new features!

This would be the ideal world, of course some problems occurred during the upgrade:

The installation of TIA Portal V11 SP1 failed. This problem could not be solved by reinstalling TIA Portal V11 but only by reinstalling Windows! With a fresh image of Windows the installation of TIA Portal V11, SP1 and Update 2 succeeded.

After updating TIA Portal and the firmware I had some major issues with the PLC. The internal memory got corrupted giving an error “Internal load memory is corrupt (delete in TIA Portal or with program card)” and I got an error saying “Internal system error (error code: 0×800011210000008d) - Please contact SIMATIC customer support.“. A complete factory reset solved these problems (but downgraded the firmware back to V1.0). So upgrading again… Some research told me this problem could be related to the use of PID controllers (I’m using them for the heat control of my home). This problem should not occur when ‘all blocks’ are downloaded after a software change. An other source speaks about having the PID block only in run when the PLC itself is in RUN mode. In all the other cases the PID controlled should be in reset mode.

Before installing Firmware version 2.1.2 I upgraded to version 2.0.3. When I tried to create user webpages this error occurred:

Conslusion: The firmware update of the S7-1200 PLC introduces a lot of new features but also some issues. If you’re happy with your old firmware don’t upgrade. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

After searching the internet and finding several solutions that worked for other people I succeeded in restoring the connection.

The solution that worked for me:

1. Take the SD card out of the Samsung Galaxy
2. Connect the phone using the USB cable
3. It will say something like can’t connect to Kies without SD card
4. Plug the SD card back into to Samsung Galaxy
5. Kies finds the phone…hooray!

After doing the above once my phone connects to my computer without a problem. If this procedure doesn’t work for you try something of the following:

Dial *#7284#. PhoneUtil will open. Set the USB mode to “MODEM” and back to “PDA”. Try to connect the phone…

Do a factory reset of the phone (you’ll find how to do this on http://www.google.com). Try to connect the phone…

Remove the phone using the “device manager” in windows. Disable the function to install drivers from windows update. Reinstall the Samsung drivers. Try to connect the phone…

Finally I can start developing applications for my phone again! The USB debugging didn’t work either…

How to find a good niche for affiliate marketing?

Finding a niche isn’t easy. You need to be able to write good articles on your blog. If you don’t know anything about the subject it will be very hard to write good content. Pick some subjects of your interest. Don’t pick one, but several subjects to get started. Begin with quantity, then select by quality. Starting with one topic could work but it’s a risk. After a month (at least) evaluate, adapt the sites, drop niches and experiment with new affiliate marketing niches.

That’s the best way to find profitable affiliate marketing niches!