dword.dk

Some weeks ago I bought an “X-Ufo” which is kind of a remote-controlled helicopter with 4 rotors. It’s great fun to fly but it takes a little practice to control it in the beginning, and the ufo inevitably takes some hard crashes. It’s for indoor and outdoor use, but I learned after chopping a couple of my plants that it was best to keep it outside. Unfortunately that requires next to no wind.

A couple of days ago some friends visited, and one of them got the idea to mount a mobile phone with a camera underneath the ufo. This resulted in some quite funny videos, some of which you can watch here. The phone survived, but at the end of the day, the ufo didn’t fly that well, so there’s a new one on its way. I can always use this one for spare parts.

Next thing, if money and time allows it, will be replacing the batteries with some larger capacity ones - the flight time is about 5 minutes currently - and a gyroscope replacement if possible. The gyroscope sitting on it is mechanical, and when the ufo is tilted more than around 20 degrees, it looses track of what is horizontal, and the ufo will crash. It appears it is possible to mod the ufo by replacing the gyroscope with a custom “piezo” module that has no mecanical parts and provides for better control. In fact “LiPo” (batteries) and “piezo” appear to be the buzzwords over at the X-Ufo forums. My German isn’t very good, but hopefully we’ll be able to get some hints from that source.

Click one of the pictures to the right to see some pictures and videos of the beast in action.

I’ve updated my Depth of Field demo to support Direct3D in addition to OpenGL, and fixed a crash on ATI cards. Click here to download source code for Linux and Windows. There’s also a binary demo for Windows available.

I must admit that Dell’s next business day service is nice. I got my video adapter replaced today, and everything is back to normal. Let’s hope this one will last a little longer.

The video adapter in my laptop was just fried. It’s a Dell XPS Gen 2 with a GeForce Go 6800 Ultra, and it’s been running flawlessly for 10 months. I was running some 3d graphics when suddenly the screen froze, and weird animated patterns appeared all over the screen. Admittedly I was running TwinView and pushing it a little, but it’s built for just that, so it should be able to handle it. When rebooting even the BIOS splash doesn’t show up, although the machine itself appears to start up normally. Luckily I have 2 months left of my on-site service, so now the “Dell man” should come and replace the adapter by tuesday. Still it sucks.

Hi, and welcome to my new weblog. I figured using a weblog for maintaining a little site as this one would be a lot easier than hacking around with those old .html files all the time. So here it is. Still a bit work in progress, though.

To check out my software projects that used to reside here on the front page, just use the links under Software in the pages list to the right.