This week I’m finally making great progress with my hand-wired mechanical keyboard.
I had finalised the electronic hardware a while ago, and now that a colleague has helped me out with programming the Teensy 2.0 the only thing that remains is to get some nice keycaps for it to replace these cheap red placeholder caps, and to create a nice case for it.
I am thinking ill go with something wood, but I am not sure how ill mount it in yet.
I also made a custom USB cable by buying some paracord, slicing the ends off an Astro Gaming USB Cable, spending hours sleeving the cable into the paracord, and then resoldering some connectors to the ends.
The heat shrinks pretty damn messy, ill tidy it up some time but it works for now.
From these I was able to find the pinout of the ‘control’ port on the back of the camera.
There is a section in the last link that has the pinouts for things.
I then used some random pinouts of the DB-9 Serial port and RJ45 Jack, to figure out what should go where.
I had a console cable for SOMETHING laying around, so I used a multimeter to trace out where the pins went on the RJ-45 end from the DB-9 end. I labelled these out of an RJ-45 jack and then took my cable from the camera and hooked up the RX to TX, TX to RX and GND to GND.
It looked like a monster..
I cleaned it up a fair bit once I knew it was working, here’s an imgur album:
I was able to connect to the camera over serial with some random non-freeware that I used a trial of, but it wasn’t that great. seemed to be a little jerky in its control.
Then I found a link to a zip file provided by Sony for their cameras also using the VISCA protocol.
PT and Z work, but the others not so much. Speed does nothing, and the aperture controls can turn it off (closed) but aren’t so great at opening it again! (it turns off the camera and closes the iris but does not re-open it when you turn the camera back on, and I can’t find how to open it manually…)
I think now I will clean the camera a bit cosmetically, and it will be good to go for the use I have 🙂 (live streaming camera through HDMI capture card)
I retrieved my Hubsan X4 from its graveyard recently, here’s a few photos showing the condition it was in.
Amazingly, it still flies!
Even after being rained on.
Missing a prop
Looks like that motor was pulled out with the prop :0
That poor leg is pretty messed up
The original battery, when I connect it the quad lights up for a few seconds as normal, maybe the protection circuit cut the power before the voltage dropped too low?
The motors escaping!
This is the only 1 cell battery I had D:
Another picture showing my nano tech 950mah battery
It powers up!
It works omg 😀
I’m actually impressed it survived a week in the sun and rain on a metal roof 😀
I’ll update soon with the footage from the SD card if it’s in tact.
So this post is going to be basis for a number of updates, essentially I picked up a TBS Discovery Pro quadcopter off ebay for $200 in pretty crummy condition, and im in the process of restoring it to its former glory.
This post is where I will be posting my progress on this, as well as to reddit but eh, this is my turf.
The hardest thing for me is going to be replacing the I2C port on the Pixhawk…
I really don’t know if I can do it, and im worried I’ll mess it up even more..
If you’re great at tiny soldering please hit me up if you can help!
The SD card, I WAS able to pull flight logs and data from it, but I won’t post it here because it probably reveals the location of the previous owner’s home..
From the electronics I have tested, it appears to work, and the telemetry is a 433Mhz 3DR system. (I confirmed later by removing the heat shrink.
The gimbal motors need replacing, and the main motors need new bearings, the I2c port needs replacing, and the receiver needs its antenna to be fixed or replaced. The top board MIGHT not work, I cant test until the gimbal is repaired. but that would be around $220 to replace im told.
Once these are done, I am confident it will fly once more! (oh and two props are fecked)
Ill also need a new telemetry module, as having one isn’t very helpful 😉
The USB port on the Pixhawk was pretty crusty and unreliable, but ordered this and connected it up and we’re back in business!
Yesterday was the first of many eleague.gg LAN parties.
It was great, will organised, lots of fun, a bunch of contests with plenty of swag and prizes to be had/won!
I got there a few minutes before opening, and quickly set up my GoPro to take a time lapse of the morning, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out too!
You can watch it here:
I also found out you can add copywrited music to YouTube videos now! It will just monetize your video and give the profits to the copyright holder.
This was the first LAN I have been to in a while, and possibly the first EVER with a decent, and stable internet connection.
The venue had a solid 1gbps symmetrical connection, and boy was it nice, I would really love something like that at home.
The 4 minute long, 4k time lapse uploaded in mere seconds, I was able to do a live stream to YouTube of playing some games with friends, all whole the entire event was being streamed to multiple streams, and every other atendee was using the net as well!
Now on to the multicopters.
A friend ofine from PAX AUS was there at the LAN, and I took my little Hubsan X4 Camera out the front of the venue to fly around a little.
My friend saw this and brought out his DJI Phantom 3 Advance to play around with.
All was good. We were each flying our own craft and it was swell, we decided to give each other’s a go.
I hadn’t properly flpwn a Phantom before so it was a new experience for both of us.
I figured that he was a trustworthy pilot considering what he owns.
This was the mistake..
He was very, very unprepared for how light the Hubsan was, and how powerful. Within seconds, he had flown it high into the sky! And into the wind..
I wasn’t paying attention because I was concentrating on the Phantom, but then my friend panice and shoved the Hubsan TX into my hands, and took his Phantom and said “I can’t control it”
I looked up, and saw the hubsan in a gust of wind, above the warehouse building, shooting down and towards the roof..
I stuck it in ‘advanced’ flight mode and tried with all my might to regain control of the craft, but alas I just did not have time, and could not see it.
Less than 5 seconds after being handed the Hubsan TX and it was gone.
I’m more disappointed that I lost all the video footage I had taken that day, and the brand new Micro SD card.
My friend has organised with security at the venue that they will help him try and get it back but until then he has lent the Phantom to me.
If they can’t get it back he is going to replace it for me (might upgrade to the FPV model…)
Until then though, I am going to learn to fly the Phantom, and get the best footage I can with the time I have!
You can expect to hear more about that soon.
Now all this multicopter stuff has come out of nowhere because the blog has been offline, but essentially I’ve recently gotten into quadcopters, and have a fair few toys.
I have a zmr250, a f550, (had hubsan x4) and some cheerson cx-10 quads.
I also picked up a TBS Discovery Pro that I’m in the process of restoring to flight condition. The poor craft had probably been stuck in a tree for two years..)
I’ll post more about that too.
That wraps it up for this post, leave a comment below if you have any questions.
I have also finally updated the slideshow and description on my photography site: http://paradox.photography/
I was having a heap of issues with the DNS, but my good friend Tyler Adler from http://adlerhost.com/ is helping me out with DNS and web hosting.
Now, a challenge I faced with the slideshow was that I wanted to showcase some of my portrait oriented photos, but the slideshow only allowed for landscape orientation. I didn’t want to let this stop me though to I chose my favorite three photos in portrait and fit them together in photoshop, over the top of one of the landscape photos.
I was experimenting with some other photos too, but I think these worked best.
I will have to change the dimensions of the image though as its cropping it on the actual page.
I got my 3D printer a few days ago(The Micro 3D Printer, last night I sat down for 15 minutes and threw a super basic design together in Google sketchup. (I already had it installed…)
There’s two compartments in the underside, one for the LED ring+digispark, one for the battery+charger.
Not sure how I’ll do the bottom yet. Probably a thin sheet of plastic glued on.
I’ll print it in either white or clear pla, and apply some kind of coating to the top for water resistance.
First print was too small because sketchup messed up my measurements, but here’s some photos anyway:
New one is printing as I type!
And on that note, here’s some photos of the printer.
you’ll need an antenna tuner because reasons, and probably extra strain relief, but think about it.
need a 10/20/40m antenna?
hook up two 10m cat5 lengths!
you could keep it in a bag, and go off camping or to a field day, forgot your cables?
no prob! head to a nearby electronics store and grab some ethernet of the length you need!
where the cat5 jacks connect to the pl-259, all wires are used in the cat5.
JUST DONT GO PLUGGING THE OTHER END INTO ANYTHING HAHAA
About a month ago, I set up pfSense on an old PC, and switched it to my main router around a week later once I had gotten the hang of it.
I turned our Asus DSL-N55u to bridge mode, and then pfSense was controlling the ADSL as well!
And with the Meraki MR18 handling WiFi, everything was taken care of.
now, Everything was running fine except a few things..
I have it set up with a squid cache, with max item cach size of 1gb. because it has a 500gb disk in it so I figured why not?
occasionallyyy, the i.imgur website will get weird errors and a few reloads are necessary ?
This seems to be remedied after a reboot of the cache, but im still not sure why it was doing this. maybe time sensitive cookies or something?
The other thing is this:
APPLE DEVICES ARE STUPID
I had my private DNS server in the list that DHCP hands out,
now one would expect as it isnt the ONLY DNS server that clients handle this just fine, so if they need to find testing.stupidurl they check them all, the public DNS say no, but mine says yes!
for the windows and android machines in the house this was very much the case.
but for the apple devices…. THEY KEPT *ONLY* SEARCHING MY DNS SERVER!
This meant that many actual websites and services kept reporting a DNS lookup error whenever people tried to use them.
Everybody in my house except me use apple devices so I have had to remove my DNS server, which has remedied the problem, and not too big a problem as I can just add it to my devices myself.. but still, why didn’t the apple devices query all the DNS servers and pick a working one ? =_=
The problem was consistent across Mac OS X, iOS 7, 8 on iPhones and iOS 8 on iPads….
Oh well… Heres a screenshot of pfSense for anybody interested:
