Ups and Downs

It was the best of times, it was the... well... no, actually times have been pretty good.

Sports mode on my camera is lame (it goes to "sleep" (as opposed to "powered off") after five minutes, despite the auto power-off setting of 30 minutes), the servo change gets me a full 90-degrees of tilt (good!) the new kites rock the house, and I got several hours of flight time over the weekend and this week.


I got my first real honest-to-goodness planned shot (a vertical portrait) and my first kite-photographing-another-kite shot (I had two line tangles before all was said and done, but I got one decent picture). I completely drained the batteries on my transmitter, found out the new charger automagically powers off when the battery is charged, and feel a lot more confident in the setup now.

I've got plans to make either a 6' or an 8' rokkaku to compliment the Flowforms, and should be expanding my available wind range by a lot in the very near future. Life's good.

Then I unwittingly stepped into the proverbial "it" in a discussion forum, making some off-hand comments in a thread on rig stability that was a lot more heated than I thought. I hate it when that happens. I hope my comments didn't do anything to throw fuel on a fire, but chances are they did. In any case I'm new to KAP, I really don't have any usable input to share, so I'm dropping out of that discussion.

Which leaves more time for flying, so I'm taking that as an up and smiling, regardless.

In the meanwhile I spent some time this morning cleaning out the shop. I don't have any plans at the moment to make new stuff, but it's getting close. A fellow KAPer from Brazil posted some videos of his CNC router doing gear-cutting on Youtube. That got me to thinking about my whole strategy of proofing robot parts on the scrollsaw. I think maybe I should come up with a sacrificial router table I can bolt to the mill and use it to make bot parts instead. Take off the rotary axis, take off the vise, and just leave it in 2D mode for a while. It might see more use that way.

Something else is coming up at work that might involve thread milling. That's something I've been itching to do for some time, so I'm looking forward to it. This technique can also be used to make things like filter rings for cameras, so there's plenty of cross-over potential.

Ups and downs, but on the whole life is good. Plus, the wind is up, the sun is shining, and my kite bag is in the car. I'm flying at lunch time. Can't beat it.

Tom