Assorted projects and pontifications.
I spent this past labor day re-aquascaping my shrimp tank at work. I picked up a new Mr. Aqua 3 gallon long tank along with some Baby Tears and Dwarf Hair Grass from Anthony at Lotus Aquarium. I also grabbed some extra Money Wort from my tank at home for the backdrop. What do you think? Read the full post for more updates!
Check out my new aquarium! The tank is a six gallon Fluval Edge. I currently have it stocked with one male red gold tuxedo guppy, two female guppies, and one red cherry shrimp (four were eaten as soon as I put them in the tank.) I also have a couple live plants including Java Fern, Anubias, and Moneywort. I’m going to try and add some moss soon which will hopefully…
I had been noticing pretty poor Wifi performance with my Mecanumbot, especially when I’m trying to visualize data with rviz remotely. After a couple weeks of dealing slow performance and tethering the robot with an Ethernet cord, I finally decided to kick my Netgear WNR2000 v2 router to the curb and look for something new. I ended up with the Linksys E4200 after a quick search for “best Wifi router.”…
I had a quick flight at USC this morning with the Extra 300 and the GoPro HD Hero. Below are two pictures from the flight. The third picture was taken from an EasyStar this afternoon near the Coliseum during an AeroDesign Team test flight. Click on the pictures to view larger (OK, really large) versions.
I took out my new GoPro HD Hero Naked camera today for a spin on my ParkZone Extra 300. I used the full HD recording (1920×1080 pixels @ 30 fps) option and the footage looks pretty good if you ask me! The only thing that kinda bothered me is how the exposure setting seemed to be changing every time towards sun. I would have rather the screen just be bright…
I just had an article published by Illumin! After working there for more than a year, it is cool to see something I’ve written on the site. The article is called The Quadrotor’s Coming of Age and it covers the past, present, and future of four-rotored vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles. Check it out if you are interested in these new, miniaturized drones!
For Christmas I got a DIYDrones BlimpDuino kit. This kit takes a large inflatable balloon and adds a microcontroller and some motors so that it can be remote controlled. One of the cools things about DIYDrones products is that they are open source, so I was able to hack away at the microcontroller code myself!
As a long time Windows and Linux user, I have always heard other’s thoughts on switching to a Mac. A phrase like ‘once you go Mac, you never go back’ was common occurrence when talking to others about computer manufactures and operating systems. And although I had never regarded such phrases as worthless Apple propaganda, I had suspicions about whether or not a Mac could be really be that much…