New Kite & New Controller

I got out with my new 6' rokkaku every day this last weekend. Mygawdz what a beautiful flyer! It's steady, it tracks very symmetrically, and it lifts gently enough not to feel like I'm holding onto a truck. I had one almost bad flight where a thermal collapsed and nearly dropped my kite and camera rig into a kiawe tree (think 40 foot high thorn bush). But I got lucky and was able to recover everything. My line still needs a thorough inspection, but I have 1000m of #200 line in a spool in my closet. I'm not sweating it.

Saturday morning I placed an order for an AuRiCo from Brooks's web site. The AuRiCo is an Automatic Rig Controller. You plug your tilt, pan, and shutter servos into it, and it controls the camera rig, taking pictures and rotating the various axes as you tell it to. Today the AuRiCo showed up in my mailbox, only three days after I ordered it. Brooks, I still don't know how you do that, but I'm happy you can! I need to double-check my battery's output voltage to make sure I don't fry the AuRiCo, but I think I should be able to have it mounted and working by this weekend.

I hope to make two flights with the AuRiCo. The first is at the summit of Mauna Kea. The Office of Mauna Kea Management gave me permission to do this a while ago, provided none of the images are used for commercial purposes, and provided I don't interrupt any observatory operations. I'll be careful!

The second flight is still in the dreaming phase: The humpback whales are here again, and I'd like to be able to go out on a boat and fly a kite over them. I've been warned by enough people that soft kites are tough to use on boats (Flowforms are out) and that kites with long bridle lines are also difficult to use (rokkaku is out, too). Which means I don't have a kite for this venture yet. I've also been told that radio rigs are difficult to use from a low-slung boat, and that dunking your transmitter is a very real risk. So I wanted to use the AuRiCo to drive the camera. If I manage to pull this off, I'll be pleased as punch. 'Till then, I'll happily fly on Mauna Kea.

On another note, I'm apparently just as boring as I'd guessed. No comments to my last post. So I don't think anyone other than me reads this. Ah well. Maybe I shouldn't quit my day job.

Tom