New Stuff

Hi, welcome to Maxx's stuff, I'm Maxx and this is my stuff.

What stuff have I be playing with while it has been raining.

Quad copter stuff.

Well it has been quite a while since doing a blog and I am sure some of you are waiting to see the quad flying. Unfortunately the weather here has been pretty appalling. It has rained quite reliably on the week ends for the last few months. I have had some opportunity to test fly the quad with not too much success.
The main problem I have been having is the quad flips. I have checked the placing of the motors (as there are many conflicting posts as to the motor layout). Checked that it is X config and not +. Reversed the sensors, and every time two motors will speed up while they lift instead of slowing. So I bought the i86L controller board while I try to figure what is occurring with the HK 2.1. This board works really well out of box, but I have found that even with the gain turned right up, the thing is sluggish, it takes a good second before controls are translated, by which time the craft has collided with the kids fort in the yard.

The result is as pictured, and this pic shows after the repairing glue has dried. I did not secure it back into place while the CA was drying and now it is glued solid at this angle. When I have levelled it out I will be test flying again, with the radio rates turned right up and see if I can eliminate that sluggishness. Hopefully I will have the HK 2.1 ironed out and working by the time some nice weekend weather comes along.

Power tool stuff.

Some new stuff I have is the Hobbyking 6 in 1 machine tool. The original branding is the Unimat 1. I have wanted one of these since the early nineties when I first saw them. I had forgotten about them until I found it on Hobbyking, and at such a great price I got one. The picture shown is it set up on the work bench for wood turning. This can also lathe and mill metal, which I plan to do and try my hand at steam engines, and maybe even a schnuerle two stroke. There is a site in the U.K. that sell additional accessories as well, so there will be more bits to blog about in the future. 

So far I have just done some simple wood turning. The unit ships with some pine dowel so you can start turning right out of the box, but it is really hard to get the pine nice and smooth. I found out online that harder woods turn nicer, so I grabbed a piece from my tree out the front, a big beautiful Elm, and turned up the bigger cup, which I also made a lid for. It turns and finishes really nice, but you need to be very patient, it does take longer to turn something up as it needs to be done with a much smaller bite on the wood tool. I have some other things I am going to turn, which I will show in later blogs. I have had some of these planned before I even bought this and need to see if I can actually do it. Stay tuned.
Another tool is the cutter, which will come in handy when doing the scratch build planes. I still need to complete my Cessna180 and have my new Mini Stick from Hobbyking flying, then it will be onto the Cessna 310 from scratch. Yet to decide, Electric or Glow?
One of the guys at the club told me about converting a sewing machine to cut the wing ribs for planes. I still have the old sewing machine, but have not converted it as yet, and now I don't need to. I might clean and service it and actually start sewing, something else to add to the stuff list.

Electronic Stuff.

Another new stuff item is the Arduino from Hobbyking. They are starting to get into robotics which I was kinda hoping for in an earlier blog and they have delivered. I have so much stuff in my wish list now, it is ridiculous. Well this is going to go into my old real robots ... robot. Remember them? I bought the whole lot and they where fantastic. Played soccer, voice recognition and a really good programming interface (that only ran on Windows). Well I am going to try and revive the old robot with some new internals and see if I can get it running again. I got the LCD push button shield for testing and uploaded a program I got online to the Hobbyking website. It gives a basic test and some info about how the LCD screen works in the source code, but should be a good test for the Arduino boards. The info is not by me by the way, I just did some minor changes to make it work with the model from Hobbyking.

Video Stuff.

The last lot of "new" stuff is my new mic stand, shock mount and pop filter. This will be used for making videos and producing cleaner audio. I have had the mic for quite a while. purchased online for $15AU and it can do both shotgun and hyper-cardioid for internal audio, but it does pop really badly (or I should say I pop really badly). It is powered with a 1.5V battery and came with a quite reasonable lead. The shock mic mount put me back $15. I was planning on making one, but found that I would not be saving all that much if I did that with a piece of conduit and the fittings to make it fit to the stand still came to around $15 excluding the driving to go to the various shops to get the parts, reducers where my biggest problem.

Home made stuff!

Another addition to the "stuff", also video related is my auto prompter. I have been wanting to make one for a while, and although I am adept at using power tools, I was wanting to make something fairly cheap and easy. I got my inspiration from a Indy Mogul video clip (below), but I wanted to simplify it as much as possible and actually use "items from around the house". There seem to be a lot of videos on how to do this, but they always have some item that is a tad unique, such as a wooden box, that is not common to the average house hold (such as mine). This one is done with just a cardboard box, tape and some scrap hooping iron. There are some "extra's", and if you don’t have any hooping iron, you can usually find some from a construction site in the scrap bin, just ask for some one to get it for you, or make sure you are wearing appropriate foot ware and cloths (no thongs or shorts!). I might do a tutorial on this later, with some info on getting a good design idea before you start. I have since lined it with some scrap black cotton, thanks from the other half (thankful she is a sewer, check out her magic with cloth including this kids game board that has been published in Homespun magazine).

The Inspiration stuff.

Anyway, that is it for now, and I hope to have a bit of content over the next few months they may interest you or inspire you to try something new. Please enjoy the Indy Mogul clip on making an easy and cheap auto prompter, and my question for this blog ... Just how many hobbies do you actually have? Comment below, or write it on some masking tape and stick it to a pigeon.

 

TL;DR. Wrote about lots of new stuff and ask "How many hobbies do you have?" while listening to the Juanitos.

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