Assorted projects and pontifications.
A few months ago, I was introduced to the Arduino. The Arduino is a great little prototyping platform, but it has a limited number of I/O pins in the standard Duemilanove flavor. Well, I got my hands on an Arduino Mega tonight, the big brother of the Arduino Duemilanove, so I decided to make something with it. What I came up with is a little game called GameChuck. GameChuck works by lighting an…
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!
The mechanical group from our quadrotor team at school still hasn’t put together a working quadrotor yet, so I decided to show them up. I’ve purchased off-the-shelve electronics from AeroQuad and built a minimal frame myself. Below is the first test of the quadrotor. The flight is short because it is inside my bedroom.
Check out my new RC hovercraft! I went through two versions over two nights ending in this bad boy. It is made only out of cardboard and basic RC electronics. The electronics include a DC motor, a speed controller, a servo an RC receiver, and a 350mAh LiPo battery. Features include three rear control surfaces, a trap door along the back for the battery, and another trap door for the…
BeoHawk, a new quad-rotor helicopter that is being developed at USC’s iLab, has taken its first flight. This flight was a major milestone for Aerial Robotics Team’s goal of competing in the AUVSI International Aerial Robotics Competition. This year’s competition focuses on retrieving a USB flash drive in high security office building. The robot will have to avoid security guards, security cameras, laser trip wires, and weight-sensitive floors while stealing…
There comes a time in each man’s life where he must grow up, and become a man. Often times, in modern society, this means moving out of his parent’s house and finding a place of his own. While I haven’t found a place of my own yet, it has come time for me to move out of my parent’s house. Besides packing up essential belongings and moving them to my…
My favorite class so far at USC has been CSCI 445. The class is a general introduction to robots and teaching students a broad range of topics from robot kinematics to robot learning. Bust the best part of the class was the final project. The final project asks each group of students to create a robot that can navigate an environment and physically interact with the objects inside – all…
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!
Introducing BenBeitzel.com, the latest creation from JAVConcepts. BenBeitzel.com is the “officially rad website for Benjamin R. Beitzel,” a musician, actor, DJ, and a recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh. One of my favorite parts about this new website is the videos page. Ben has produced a number of short videos with himself, and with his band Lovenotes. Ben’s videos are creative and innovative, and are certainly a joy a…
Hello everyone! I have just secured a new job for myself for the next school year. The job is with Illumin Magazine, an online magazine put out by the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. The goal of Illumin is to illustrate the many ways engineering benefits and impacts our daily lives. Illumin articles are created by students of the University of Southern California, and are…