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Radio controlled (RC) models is my just-for-fun hobby. If I need to get rid of some stress and just have a good time, I take out my RC car/airplane/helicopter and just have fun!

Recently, HobbyPartz had their awesome black friday sales, and I managed to pick up some stuff – such as a free Thunder AC6 charger (yay!) as well as a 3D-hawk foam airplane for just $45 shipped!http://www.nitroplanes.com/91a-3dhawk-arf.html

It’s a great deal even without the black friday sale – it’s basically a receiver-ready plane as all you need to fly is a radio system and a charger. It includes the motor/esc/servos/lipo, which is pretty amazing for a $45 3D plane.

Now, it is an airplane kit – you get the parts in baggies and pre-cut foam pieces, but the bulk of the assembly as to be done by you. The instructions were very lacking (and in chinglish), but I’ve assembled a few foamies before so it was fairly straightforward. I think it took about 3 hours from opening the box to flight-ready.

There it is in all of its foam beauty! That photo is after about 10 or so flights. The stock prop broke easily, so right now I have a 8×3.8 prop on it – which happens to be the perfect size according to some people on RCGroups. This prop doesn’t fit the prop saver perfectly though, so I’m going to order some new props. Here’s a close up of the electronics:During the build you have a wide variety of mounting options for the servos/electronics, so I decided to mount everything on the bottom so that the top would look nice and clean. Besides the stock electronics I have an AR6100E receiver and three Gens Ace 450mah 2s packs (they were only about 4 bucks each!). The great thing about small planes and small packs is that you can buy a lot of them – so I have a total of four packs for about 20 minutes of flying time, all for a great price.

Anyways like I said I put about 10 packs through it, and I am not the perfect pilot. After a few crashes (including one big inverted crash!), I only had the prop break and some pieces of the nose rip off. I reinforced the nose/motor mount with some hot glue and taped the bottom of the nose with packing tape, so now it’s practically indestructible.

Overall it’s a pretty fun plane (being capable of 3D maneuvers!), especially for its price.

Here’s my quadrocopter as of 12-13-11.

It’s a DIYDrones Arducopter with a HobbyKing camera mount and JV100 camera. I added the GPS and magnetometer for autonomous flight. Using a single 2200mah 3s lipo I get around 4 minutes of flight… which is kind of pathetic!

I do have some bigger (and I mean BIGGER) motors and ESCs, so once I find some time in January I’ll drop those in along with some nice 5000mah 4s packs I have. Hopefully then I’ll get around 20 minutes of flight time, which would be awesome!

Some sample aerial photos here:

I’m working on a quadrocopter, and I needed a wireless video system for it. As usual, HobbyKing delivers with the best bang-for-my-buck wireless video system!

Link: http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/uh_viewItem.asp?idProduct=13442

So for around 75 bucks, you get a 800mw (!) 900mhz transmitter, a receiver (digital!), camera, wiring harness, and antennas. It’s a great deal that RangeVideo can’t even come close to. 800mw should have a mile or two of range with a patch antenna.

To finish the setup, I added my EasyCap USB video capture device (to connect the composite out from the reciever to my computer), a 12V wall adapter for the receiver (will be replaced by a 3s lipo for portability), and a small 3s lipo to power the transmitter. That’s it! Picture below.

On the left you see the power cable for the receiver, the receiver, the EasyCap device, and my laptop. I’m using VLC media player to capture the video.

On the right is the video transmitter (which is surprisingly heavy) along with the camera and the 3s 1300mah lipo battery, which supplies the ~12V to the transmitter/camera.

One common complaint with this system is the weight of the transmitter – it’s quite hefty. I decided to take a look inside.

It turns out the transmitter unit itself is very small and light – most of the bulk is from the metal spacers and the metal (brass?) enclosure. For now, since I am upgrading my quadrotor to use bigger motors, I’m going to keep the heavy case. If you need a light system you could get rid of the extra heatsinking at the risk of shortening the life of the transmitter.

Anyways I can’t wait to upgrade my quadrotor and maybe do some FPV flying!

Cheap components/parts:

www.taydaelectronics.com

www.mdfly.com

www.dipmicro.com

www.bgmicro.com

See my occupy boston aerial photos here:

http://www.ultimaterc.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1205756#post1205756

I came to MIT excited about many things – but IP addresses weren’t one of them. However, after a semester here, I now realize how awesome having certain IP addresses are.

As a background, every web site you go to has an address – a sequence of numbers. When you type in a “normal” address, like www.exastify.com, a nameserver actually goes and looks up the text “www.exastify.com” and finds the IP address assigned to it – 255.255.255.255 for example. Domain names exist so that you don’t have to memorize a sequence of numbers.

Now, currently addresses are in the format of four 8-bit numbers (also known as IPV4). Way back when the Internet was created, they figured that was plenty – 255^4, or four trillion unique IP addresses. The funny thing is, now that the Internet is somewhat popular, we are starting to run out of IP addresses. Now we’re switching over to IPV6, but back to MIT…

MIT owns all IP address starting with 18.

ANY IP address, 18.whatever.whatever.whatever, is a MIT IP address. This is a ton of IP addresses. Like, over 200 million of them. For one university of around 10,000 students and 10,000 faculty/staff. This means we can abuse them a little! I personally “own” one of them – 18.250.1.113, with a domain room5098.mit.edu. This is one of my Arduino web servers.

Pretty awesome stuff!