How come?

How come as soon as you have a new hobby, events conspire to make sure you can't do anything about it? In the last week we've had a hurricane (can't fly kites in a hurricane), a wildfire that almost took out my neighborhood (can't fly kites in smoke with helicopters), a tsunami warning (ok, ok, so you can fly kites during a tsunami... besides, it hit at 3am), and some nasty sessions at work (no flying at lunch.) I just wanted to fly!

So how come when you think you have your best hobby day in a long time, you find out later you're wrong? To be fair I have to temper that statement somewhat. I took off for work early (we're going to be at a remote work site for upwards of eight to eleven days, and I got a head-start). It was howling tradewinds when I left home (upwards of 40kts) but it was just a nice steady breeze at the pu'u I wanted to photograph. Kite went up, it was rock solid in the air, so I hooked up the rig and let out line. Hot dog! The rig was stable, I got lots of photographs (81), and the camera didn't go to sleep even once during the entire hour-long session. I was stoked!

Aaaaand then I took a look at the pictures. I can't say I was disappointed, bu... no, actually, I was pretty darned disappointed. I missed several targets (I still can't aim the thing well) and the rig was right in the sun most of the time, so I was flying blind for the most part. I think I'd have had better luck with an autoKAP rig and a lot more walking.

In any case the wind cooperated, and I'm interested in trying it again later in the week.

On other news, my shop is still a mess, but I've come up with some projects to do. A lot of strictly 2D milling, but if I can get all the parts to fit in a 6"x6" square I can prototype them in 1/16" 6061 and then make the final parts using carbon fiber. But I'll likely have a waterjet house cut the carbon fiber. It's hellish on tools and lungs.

I convinced some folks at work to look into the Atmel ATNGW100 network gateway demo board. It's an AVR32 processor running an honest to goodness installation of Linux. Out of the box it's running Samba, Apache, sshd, and a bunch of other stuff. We're looking at it for the automation project that's going on, but I'm also interested in it for a few other reasons as well:

Your typical Linux server (not desktop) draws roughly 100-200 watts constantly. Say you've got a server that serves web, mail, disk, and a handful of other services in addition to ssh for logins. 100 watts, 24 hours in a day, that's 2.4kWh to run the thing.

Now just suppose you used an ATNGW100 to do the same thing. It consumes around 100mW, though it has no disks. It can act as a USB host, though, so USB or network attached storage can provide disk. (It does have an SD and MMC card slot, but constantly banging an SD or MMC card will kill it in short order.) If you can manage to arrange your fetchmail cron jobs so it only turns on the disk once every ten minutes or so, you're still looking at roughly 150mW. 24 hours in a day, that's 0.0036kWh per day. That's a lot better.

Mind you I haven't tested this, but it's a plan in the works. I should have the ATNGW100 in about a week, and should be able to try setting up a replacement Linux host shortly after that. Radio Shack sells an IDE->USB enclosure that'll take any IDE drive. (But for a little more I can get a 250GB USB drive, so I'll probably ask my boss to spring for that instead.) Hope it works.

By extension, these could also be extremely cheap DNS, DHCP, NIS, etc. servers. One of the best DNS/DHCP implementations I saw was this very scalable, highly redundant multi-server setup a friend of mine did for Tivoli. If this could be done on a slightly smaller scale using ATNGW100 boards, but losing none of the redundancy and fail-over functionality, that could be a really nice alternative to the single point of failure model so many small business use.

A quick rant: At home I run a single Linux server that takes care of several tasks. But I would never ever do this in the work place. It's asking for trouble. Get separate machines for each service: one for mail, one for DHCP/DNS, one for web, etc. Preferably get more than one so you have some fail-over assurance. But at no point should a single point of failure for one service mean that another service might be compromised. I've been at places that use the home model at work, and it never performs well.

This is one of the reasons I'm so interested in seeing if the ATNGW100 can be used this way. Figure your typical new Linux machine is between $500 and $2500 US. An ATNGW100 is $89. Add a nice case and a wall wart power supply and the price is about $120. You can get four of those for the price of a desktop "server" or upwards of 20+ for the price of a decent server. Set some up as load-balancers and the rest up as redundant single-service servers, and you have an infrastructure that would be very very hard to take down, and dead-easy to maintain and upgrade with nearly zero down-time.

Can't wait to find out if I've got my foot shoved in my mouth for saying that! Only time will tell.

Tom

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

Airborne At Last

My kites should've arrived Saturday, but there was no notice at the post office. I checked on Monday, but no notice. So Monday night I used the USPS tracking page and... Yep, it had been delivered Saturday morning at 6am, but I never got my yellow card to tell me it was there. So Tuesday morning I asked if I had a box, and sure enough there it was. NEW KITES!

By the time I got back to my car, the rain had started... The fates love me.

So I spent some time installing the PeKaBe blocks (which are great) re-rigging the tails to fit onto the Flowforms (which was dead-easy) and finding some way to put a thousand feet of #250 dacron line onto a winder (I used an extension cord reel from the hardware store). Yep, still raining.

It rained the next day, too. So I drove home at the end of the day and... no rain! No rain?! No rain. I grabbed the kite bag, grabbed some kids, and almost sprinted to the pasture near my house only to find... It was full of cows who'd probably bolt at the sight of a great big flying mattress, and probably poop on my gear. So I threw kids in the car, threw my kites in the back and took off. I drove until sun-down, and one after another I had no-go flying sites (no wind; wind, but helicopters; no wind; wind blowing into power lines; wind shift, and the power lines moved to the other side, so back into power lines; rain). The fates love me.

So finally it was clear this morning. I had some time before an appointment, so I launched. The new kites are outstanding. The wind was gusty, so I can't say they were rock solid (no kite would be in gusty wind) but it was pull and lull in turns, not wild gyrations all over the sky like the older kites! I threw caution to the wind (har) and hooked up my rig. A quick gear check and I was airborne again! Click click click... click click... click... Five minutes before my appointment I walked the kite down, put the gear away, and took off. It was a good two hours before I got to look at what I'd captured on camera. I loaded the card, opened it up, and... Quicktimes? Somehow my camera had been set to movie mode. ARGH! The fates love me.

I went back out at lunch (of course) and made sure the camera was set to photo mode. All in all things worked out well. There was maybe one keeper out of about thirty images, but I learned a lot from my mistakes. I have some wind-induced tilt to the rig I need to think about. I found a sports mode setting on the camera that gives significantly faster shutter speed, making for fewer blurred shots. I found out that KAP movies make me nauseous. Even when I did them on purpose the second time. Too much motion.

All in all, though, I'm stoked. I have some stuff to try out (sports mode, check rig balance, try to get more travel out of my tilt servo), I have an utterly unphotogenic site to test at, and I have a weekend full of beautiful beaches to look forward to with my hopefully newly developed technique.

Maybe the fates really do love me after all!

Tom