Nerd up

i have exploded into the geek world this week. firstly, RC stuff has always been cool, but more recently, fairly affordable. With these two truths in full effect, i bought meself a ready-to-fly, fully functionally, 6 channel remote controlled helicopter.



Holly, if you're reading this, Scotter made me do it. He does, after all, make more money than me. And now, for Nick's Sake, some provocative shots of the beast undressed...
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Oh... it seems to have fallen out of it's wears... Any pilot worth his salt will notice that those rotors are about 20% shorter than they should be. Well, fuck. I'm here to tell you it ain't easy to fly one of these bastards. So i suspect when i'm done typing here i'll shoot up to the local torture and hobby store to get some new rotors.




the drive around town will give housemate and I a chance to test out accelerometer v.1.0. I'm really having fun with this one...



Stealing my inspiration from the internet (housemate on software, me on hardware), we used a microprocessor to read the analog output of an accelerometer. The accelerometer is a one chip design that measures +/- 2.5 G's on the two axis parallel to the chip itself. The processor uses it's internal analog to digital converter (ADC) to average and display these values real time. It will also hold the max value at any given time for about 1.2 seconds, so you can easily read off peak values as you're, for example, evading police interrogation in your highly modified, bullet proff caddy. Expect great things from this project in the future...

These are the projects that make life fun for an engineer who's real-life job involves pushin' too many pencils.