ByteMaster0's blog

An open holiday letter for the end of 2009

Dear friends, family, and all those who make up a part of my life,

Today I write an open letter to all of you, reflecting on what has been a dynamic year in 2009. Of course many will be quick to point out its downsides, but despite this, the year has also represented, what I believe anyway, to be progress on many fronts that may not yet be apparent. But, no matter what the year has meant to you, one thing is clear - we have all supported each other through its progress, and our lives are not the same without each other. This has been a year of growth for me, not only in my career as I approach the finish line of my Ph.D. studies, but also in my personal relationships and interactions with all of you.

There may be some of you reading this that I only speak to in passing, or perhaps we only have the chance to connect once or twice a year, perhaps even less. There are others that are a part of my daily life - you support me in everything I do, and I try to return the favor - my day and my life wouldn't be the same without you. There's my family, without whose support I would not be where I am. There are those of you who fall inbetween, but are still just as critical to me and my life. And there are those friends that I have lost - either through a fault of my own, through loss of contact, or through some misunderstanding - for you, my door and heart are always open, should you want to put past issues behind us.

For all, I wish 2010 to be a happy one, in whatever journeys you will take. We have a lot of growing to do as human beings, and as humankind and society. But thankfully, I have had all of you in my life to make my personal growth all that it has been, and I hope that I can do so as well as we all continue our walk through life. Best wishes,

-Adrian

Autopilot working - an eye in the sky

After months of tweaking, working, test flights, and more tweaking, I have a working autopilot system on the new Alpha! Well, this actually happened over 3 weeks ago, but regardless, it is a major step forward. Below is actual video footage of the onboard down-throw camera. This is the actual flight that I will use for data in my simulations. You can clearly see the houses in good detail, yet with enough altitude to make the flight patterns feasible.

The autopilot itself works flawlessly. Its first full-auto flight was at Cane Ridge. Funny story, I had an engine flameout and didn't even notice it. With 6 other birds in the air (almost all internal-combustion), and 3 of them orange-colored Alphas, I lost track of the plane as it kept drifting downward, under autopilot control. I was filming its flight as it happened. Fortunately, the AP realized that the plane was below its security altitude, and maintained level flight, right before it landed in a patch of tall grass. The plane was too low for me to do anything as I realized that there was trouble. No damage, and all was fine. After a few more dead-stick landings, I realized that the engine's low-speed needle valve was not properly tuned. All is now well, and it flies beautifully.

Now that I have my test-case data, I will hopefully add a second aircraft, which may be sponsored by Hobby Lobby. I will also be adding bi-directional 802.15.4 radios for proper air-to-ground and possibly air-to-air communications. It's a bit annoying to have to connect a serial cable to the plane every time I want to take off. But, it works beautifully. Enjoy the video below!

The Alpha's Omega and reincarnation

This afternoon, against my better judgment, I decided to fly in high winds, hoping to test the final configurations of my autopilot. I had a bad feeling about it, and an empty field with no other RC pilots confirmed my suspicions - it wasn't a good day to fly. Perhaps the coup de gras to the whole wind assessment was the parasailer (using a 3-wheeled contraption and a sail) going for a ride. But, I had a time constraint for gathering data, and I needed to do it now. A week ago, I had sucessfully flown in 18MPH winds, and had one of my best landings ever. After one takeoff attempt ended in the ditch, I repositioned for another attempt instead of going home. If I just repositioned better, I thought, things would turn out okay. I gave it full throttle, and the plane popped up into the air, as hoped. However, a strong gust caught the wing, and torqued the plane to the right. The plane turned, and as you might imagine, the effect of going head-on into the 16-18MPH wind, then turning around with the wind to the plane's tail, robbed the aircraft of all its lift. I mashed the controls helplessly, but the plane was only 15-20 feet in the air.

It nosedove, and the resulting full-frontal impact was epic and catastrophic. The engine smashed into the asphalt runway, and most of the nose splintered into thousands of pieces. The wing, however, remained mostly unharmed, and the tailpiece broke off the fuselage. But, the damage is pretty catastrophic, as you can see. Fuselage, landing gear, fuel tank, battery, engine, prop, spinner are all gone.

However, it is reborn in a new incarnation of the Alpha, seen in the last picture. The autopilot and sensors all survived the impact, mostly because of careful planning on my part. I have tweaked the autopilot to work on the new airframe, edited waypoints, and am looking for calm weather tomorrow morning for a test flight. At the moment, will go try to start the new engine to see how it runs, and tweak if necessary. More later.

UPDATE: The new engine fired up, servo travel and neutral points are more finely tweaked in the autopilot firmware, GPS and IR sensors are functioning normally, changes to the flightplan have been made, and we're good to go! Next flight is scheduled for this Friday in the early morning, when winds are expected to be a calm 3 MPH.

Airframe is nearly debugged - autopilot engages

I was able to procure a replacement voltage regulator board. Instead of going with the default 2.25A onboard regulator, I purchased an 8A continuous, 15A peak regulator from Danielle's R/C, and a battery to go with it (a LiPo battery is recommended, but I'm driving it with a NiMH for the moment.) You can see the wire melee in the pic (sorry, took it with the Pre instead of my camera setup.)

I plugged in the new regulator, and the autopilot board booted right up! Unfortunately, as I was removing the old regulator, I crushed a tiny, microscopic Schottky diode out of existence. It's less than 1mm in size. I have ordered a set of 20 replacements for $1.86 from Mouser, but they will take a few days to arrive. The diode in question controls the GPS's reset line, so GPS will be offline for the moment, unfortunately. I did take the time to iron out my airframe config, and after about 8 hours of work, I finally was able to get it to compile! Even better, when I uploaded the firmware to the AP board, the servos greeted me, all working properly! (once I had reassigned a few lines.) The mode switch also is demonstrating that it works properly - on engagement of the autopilot modes, the system automatically enabled the throttle and set a course correction in motion.

Once the replacement parts come in from Mouser, I think I should be able to head to the field to do some full-manual-control testing. Once I'm satisfied that all control inputs are being executed according to my wishes, I will extensively debug my airframe config, and then give the autopilot the go! More later.

UAV Update: Autopilot kablooey

Everything seemed to be ready to go for the first test of the autopilot board. Infact, an initial test showed it worked perfectly! Servos were moving, everything seemed happy. Then I hooked up an additional, fateful wiring harness to the R/C receiver's battery input port.

Because of a wording/phrasing ambiguity in the manual for the PPM encoder board, I did the opposite of what I was supposed to do. (I seriously can only take half the responsibility here - it was terribly worded and quite ambiguous.) Unfortunately, the AP board went kablooey. More specifically, the PTH08080 linear voltage regulator died. You can see it, somewhat fuzzily, in the photo - just click on it. Sorry, I didn't put my macro lens on, the standard walkaround was acceptable enough. Fortunately, the part is easy to replace, and not expensive (about $8) and I've already ordered a replacement from DigiKey. However, this will mean more delays. At least know I know that the interfacing works properly, and we should be in the air shortly!

A look one year back

On October 27th, 2008 at around 11AM, my life nearly changed permanently - and nearly in a bad way. After weighing the advantages (and in my mind, at the time, the disadvantages) of patiently waiting for a truck to slowly accelerate to speed right before an on-ramp to I-40 Eastbound, I decided, poorly, to pass the slow-moving vehicle in my 2006 Civic on the left right before crossing infront of it to make the relatively sharp curve onto the highway onramp. Needless to say, the maneuver resulted in massive oversteer. I couldn't correct early, for risk of flipping my car over an island. Instead, I chose to wait out the slide, but it was too late. I helplessly mashed the brake pedal, but my tires found no purchase and I smashed into an embankment at nearly 65MPH.

My luck turned for the better, as the embankment was sloped instead of a flat wall. After taking off the front bumper, deploying the airbag and flattening the lower half of the engine bay, I ramped off the embankment instead of smashing full-force into it. Because of the angle, the momentum caused the car to flip over, and I continued the rest of the journey on the roof of the car, sliding backwards.

I will never forget the smells, the pops, crunches, smashes, and shattering noises that I smelled, felt, and heard that day. I am lucky and grateful to be alive to tell this story, yet I never suffered a single injury other than airbag burn. While it is obivous that, had the car been equipped with Electronic Stability Control (see an amazing demo here) that the oversteer would not have happened. Yet, this is no excuse. I learned a very hard, but valuable lesson that rides with me every day that I drive. Today, I happily drive a 2009 Jetta TDI with Electronic Stability Control (called ESP for Electronic Stabilisation Programme). I strive every day to be safer, to be patient, and to be thankful that I wasn't hurt, and that I hurt nobody else.

So, today I think back, solemnly, yet gratefully, and continue to make the promise of patience to myself and others. Thanks for reading.

Fun with a bouncy-ball @1000FPS

This is an entirely non-research related post - I purchased a giant, fluid-and-sparkly-filled bouncy ball at Walmart. The poor fellow was sitting alone on a clearance aisle, no pricetag, and it seemed to be the last of its kind. It is precisely what I went in to get. In the clip, you can see it deform vertically about 25-30% (!) as it hits the ground from about 4 feet.

In research news, I'm waiting for a few more parts to come in from Mouser and Newark before the autopilot will be completely integrated into the airframe. The autopilot is working (the board boots) and my airframe and radio configuration files are essentially complete. More later.

Upgrades, upgrades, upgrades

Hello world! It's been a while. On the research front, I thought I'd make a small posting about what's going on with the airplane. My advisor has purchased a Paparazzi autopilot module (with GPS and horizon sensing) for integration with the Alpha. I have prepared the way by upgrading the Alpha's radio system to a new Spektrum DX7 radio (7-channel, 2.4GHz DSM2) and an AR6200 6-channel receiver. The upgrades are necessary, as the autopilot module needs a dedicated channel to switch the unit into operational or standby modes. I have also changed the prop to a 2-bladed prop, permitting much faster climbing rates and faster speed. The old 3-blade prop was designed for training, and created tremendous air resistance to keep the engine from operating in its power band (and therefore higher RPM range.)

After making a few more camera mounts, a number of flights, and a few different cameras and sensory equipment (the autopilot hasn't arrived yet), I went for a number of test flights, and flew out at Cane Ridge Park, which is open on weekends and from 8-11PM. It is a bit far, but the day/time restrictions on the Warner R/C field are simply too draconian to be useful for weekend data collection. Today's flight, equipped with BOTH camera and GPS, topped out at 2427 feet off the ground! Also, at that altitude, I can see, with the Nikon camera, a remarkable 600 meters across! The autopilot should be coming in soon, so I will have much more to report and show at that time. There are many new videos, I just haven't posted them yet. More later.

All the images shown here are video stills - which explains their relatively poor quality. The first is of the forward-looking camera, mounted to the side. It's an ATC3K, on loan to me from Alex. The second is from the Nikon, belly-mounted, at 2400 feet off the ground. Lastly, there is a shot from the ATC3K, down-throw-mounted, as the aircraft was flying above the clouds.

Alpha 40 altitude profile

On September 26th, I put a GPS onboard the Alpha to record altitude, path, and speed information. Here are some selected results (I did a second test run yesterday, but those results aren't included here:)

Average speed: 40-42MPH
Max speed: 60+MPH
Peak altitude (under my control): 1088 ft above the ground (in MSL, this is about 1683 feet)

More later!

New Jersey

I visited my half-sister Bettina, her husband Patrick, and their uebercute two kids Raymond (8) and Ava (5). I will be posting more about this soon - including some slow-mo clips of Ray jumping into the pool - very cool. I'm up to my ears in crap at the moment, so I'm keeping this short.

Alpha 40 Plane Cam over Dayton Ohio

See Dayton like you've never seen it before! Well, North Dayton, anyway. Radio-controlled flight of my Hangar 9 Alpha 40 at the Wingmasters' field in North Dayton, OH - near I-75 and Siebenthaler Avenue at Wegerzyn park. I was attempting to fly it at WPAFB's RAMS field, but a permit was needed, and the gates were closed. This flight occurred during my previous visit to Dayton. We drove up to Wegerzyn Park in the afternoon, and the weather proved absolutely perfect. Some loose materials caused some minor unpredictability (a wrong screw for the empennage), but the flight was good.

At one point, it seemed that I was almost about to enter a cloud - though it can be seen in the video that I'm still a few (maybe 50-100) feet away from that goal, though it's still hard to tell. There were some nice clouds in the area. Look for a view of Downtown Dayton further on in the clip. Also visible is I-75, which was very close by. The Wingmasters field is absolutely beautiful, with many more facilities than the Warner Park R/C field. It is in better upkeep, and isn't as restrictive in types and times of aircraft and flight.

Peak altitude was about 1000 ft, average flight speed about 42-45MPH, and max speed was north of 62MPH.

Vancouver

At the moment, I am in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, staying at the downtown Holiday Inn. I am attending the 2009 Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing conference, and will be presenting a paper at the TrustCom 2009 International Symposium on Trusted Computing and Communications.

It's late, but check back later for more updates, and some PHLOG entries, if have the time to upload them. As a random fact, my laptop is picking up over 43 DIFFERENT wireless networks from my room! Thank goodness for DSSS, otherwise it'd be a nightmare - I'm betting it already is. DSSS or not, that's an awful lot of congestion on the spectrum, and something's gotta give, at least in terms of speed. This city is very lively late at night! More later.

Trip to Santa Fe

From the 21st through the 25th, I was in Santa Fe, NM with my parents, attending the Santa Fe chamber music festival. My parents had invited me to go, and we stayed on the outskirts, within 20 minutes. Lynn Harrell, a world-renowned cellist who had given me a masterclass 9 years ago, was playing on the last two performance days. All the concerts were fantastic, and inbetween concerts, we visited national monuments such as the Bandelier National Monument, where cliff-dwelling Pueblo Native Americans lived. We also explored some scenic routes, as well as the South West Indian Art exhibition.

Pictures can be seen on the PHLOG, so click on over (the link is on the right) for some shots of animals and cliff dwellings. On a funny note, I had my sunglasses pickpocketed while at the art market/convention. A kid stole them right out of my pocket. I returned half an hour later to find them sitting on a cooler - the boy had placed them there with his snack and a drink. So, while he was distracted/away for a moment, I grabbed them back. I saw him later, looking under the chair, trying to find them.

There are many other pictures, I will be posting them later.

In-flight WiFi

I'm currently writing this entry from Delta flight 1967 on the way to Albuquerque, on the way to Santa Fe. This is the first flight I've taken that is equipped with in-flight WiFi service, powered by Gogo. Representatives handed out complimentary access cards, so I decided to try it out. Even if the cards weren't available, the service charge is reasonable: $13 for a 24-hour pass. On a longer flight, I'd definitely consider paying for it.

As for the connection, it's a bit spotty - sometimes cuts out, but is fast enough - somewhere between 500-900kbit/s downstream, 200kbit/s upstream. Nothing over which I'd consider watching streaming HD video, but enough to ensure connectivity. I'm writing this post @34,000 ft. somewhere over Arkansas - maybe I'll blame connectivity issues on that - sorry Crystal. More later.

TDI

About three-and-a-half weeks ago, I purchased a new silver 2009 VW Jetta TDI. It is a 2.0-liter Turobocharged Commonrail direct-injected diesel engined-car, with a double-clutch automated manual transmission. I was presented with a loan opportunity too good to pass up, and after a few calculations, it made sense to purchase it. First off, my average fuel economy on the old 2.5 was about 26 MPG. I was driving the car at a rate of 35,000 miles per year (in 9 months of driving it, I had put over 25,000 miles on it). At 80k-miles, an expensive $700 service was awaiting me.

I purchased the new car, and immediately experienced the fuel economy differences. On my average commutes, I'm getting about 42 MPG, including both city and highway portions. On my trip to Dayton this weekend, I averaged 49.3 MPG (!) with cruise control (which is NOT the most efficient way to drive, by far). If I push it a bit, I can get an average of 52.3MPG average, but this requires almost no traffic and as little stopping as possible. The best mileage is obtained at about 42MPH in 6th gear, at which I can get about 64 MPG on a flat surface with no wind. Infact, this is the very year and model of car that was used to set a 50-state fuel economy record, at 58.82 MPG average over 9400 miles (approx.)

The fuel savings alone amount to a MINIMUM $1100 per year, and if gas/diesel climb towards the $3.50 mark, I will see a savings of over $2000/year. In addition, I qualify for a $1300 tax credit for an advanced lean-burn vehicle. Along with a 0% APR on the loan, it all adds up. The car is amazing to drive (it's the same body style as the older 2.5, but with some improvements), and is significantly faster than the old car, and of course more efficient. The transmission uses two sets of gearboxes (one for odd gears, one for even gears), and two clutches that automatically engage. Rather than using a fluid coupling, as found in an automatic, the clutches provide better fuel economy, and much faster shifting. The transmission can shift gears in 8ms, which is faster than any human could do the job. As a result, you get the economy of a manual, the performance of a manual, and the convenience of an automatic (though you can take full manual control if you wish.)

The engine is marvelous. It is quiet, and CLEAN. There is no appreciable smell, and it is very responsive. It generates 236 lb-ft of torque, which is comparable to that of many V8-powered gasoline-fueled SUVs. As a result of the emissions system and the reduced fuel consumption, the car also creates significantly-reduced hydrocarbon output. In any case, while I did wait to post about this, I'm very glad I got it. It's a wonderful car. More later.