brainwagon

As I was staring at the cross sectional diagram of the Armin wing I constructed yesterday, I began to think about airfoil shapes in general. I knew from reading done years ago that there were standardized ways of describing airfoil shapes, but didn’t recall any details. I didn’t have a copy of Abbot’s Theory of […]

Ed over at the Experimental Airlines Youtube channel has a nifty way of constructing wings for RC airplanes out of cheap Dollar Tree foamboard. Last night, I was feeling kind of brainless, so I decided to practice my arts and crafts by constructing another, this time using a piece of 3/16″ dowel to stiffen it. […]

I’m pretty interested in autonomous vehicles, and because of the wide availability of cheap electronics and compute power, experimentation in this realm is increasingly within the grasp of amateurs. I like the idea of building small aerial drones which can not only follow a predetermined coarse, but can also work to avoid obstacles and the […]

If you or your loved ones are in the areas affected by Sandy, you may not be able to read this, but my thoughts are with you all. If you aren’t in the affected areas, considering helping out in the relief efforts by donating either money or blood to the Red Cross. You can donate […]

I was listening to Amateur Radio Newsline to a story about a lightweight balloon payload that crossed from Great Britain to Sweden carrying a payload which weighed less than 100 grams and using just 10mw. I thought that was cool, so I googled around and located these neat instructions on building a lightweight GPS tracker. […]

Okay, yesterday I admitted that I could not do math. According to Sean Foster’s hints on trainer design, the horizontal stabilizer should have had an area of between 20 and 30 percent of the area of the main wing. My main wing is 30 inches with a six inch chord, so it has an area […]

I haven’t done much flying this week, in part because we’ve begun to get some rain here in the SF Bay Area, but also because I have just been having difficulty controlling the Nutball. I began to think that what I needed was a proper trainer airplane. A couple of weeks ago, I read this […]

As I was watching Vogelsong pitch a gem against the Cardinals, I thought it might be cool to try some additional experiments with paper/foamcraft and try to create a simple (even trivial) wing from some Dollar Tree foamboard. I had previously experimented with building an Armin wing as described by Ed at Experimental Airlines. It […]

Without further ado… if you want code to implement this: You can download this this zip file. Do with it what you will.

Carmen suggested that we try to go out and fly my Nutball, since she hadn’t seen it in the air before. Our local park seemed too small, and Cesar Chavez turned out to be windy, so we did a quick websearch and discovered that the Lime Ridge open area in Concord was popular with fliers, […]

Having written the previous FFT based implementation of Conway’s life, we can easily implement life variants with larger neighborhoods which run just as fast. This is a variant called Bugs, which has a neighborhood of radius 5, and includes the center square. If it is “alive” and has between 34 and 58 neighbors (inclusive), it […]

I was struck by the lunatic programming muse again today. While reading my twitter feed, I encountered a description of SmoothLife, a generalization of Conway’s classic Game of Life. Instead of being implemented on a grid of discrete binary values, SmoothLife is implemented over a continuous, real valued field. What’s kind of neat is that […]

Okay, my last blog mentioned the over-pressure situation aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch. Today, I experienced my own launch failure: flying my homebrew Nutball RC plane. This was my “new, improved” version, with a swappable fuselage, and 5 degrees of down angle on the motor. Mark Harrison and I decided to get out and […]

Yesterday was an important day in the history of space flight: for the first time a commercial entity launched a resupply mission to the International Space Station. I thought it was a pretty big deal, but you’d never have known by watching the news yesterday. ABC news cut away from their coverage of politics and […]

I’m waiting for new props and the like to arrive for more RC fun, but in the mean time I tried to satisfy some curiousity that I had regarding the “trainer” mode that my Turnigy 9X transmitter has. The idea is that if you have a master flyer (like my friend Mark) and a complete […]