I'm not dead! Updates and teasers.

Radio breaking squelch Is this thing on? Oh good!
It's been a LONG time since the last update and that's my fault, apologies for the delays in posts but oh the things that have happened since the last one have been AWESOME.

New generation precision suntracker, printed variant

To start off, I have passed a year at the new job and it has been a whole freaking year of awesome times, some frustration with part of the program and then elation when finally it all worked together as intended. Developing a new high precision solar tracker from the ground up has been a massive challenge due to difficulties with getting the most critical part, the imaging Multi Object Tracking sensor that is also found in modern Wiimotes, working from just a datasheet and my admittedly terrible coding skills. Getting the driver working correctly really allowed the power and incredible value of a logic analyzer for debugging a system. On the plus side, once that was working the rest was not too much harder and I have obtained permission from PXI to open source my library once that is working so anyone can unlock the power of this wonderful sensor. Another happening here was my first field campaign with my system, destination Arizona State University to do final debugging and training of the team that will be taking it to the Amazon rain forest.

Upcoming appearance at DEFCON 25 in Vegas

You read that right, this year I'm going to be at the one and only DEFCON in Las Vegas!!!! Since this year I'd had a mutual friend of W1NST0N and I's offer some space in his penthouse suite, we ran budget estimates for flight and food, found it was well within reason and decided to go for it. I've been watching the DEFCON talks on YouTube for YEARS and have learned a TON from them, and now I can ask questions and talk to the presenters in addition to a wide range of hardware and software hackers. Another bonus is I'll be able to meet more of my readers and put faces to the handles of quite a few of the people that I've been interacting with over the years across various platforms. If you find me, I'll have the normal 3D printed rings and some swanky new business cards to give you. Over the course of the event I'll be regularly tweeting my whereabouts and meetup spots, so come say hi, I don't bite and am more than happy to answer any questions you have!

Remember: What I do release ends up under BeerWare licensing so this is a good opportunity to get those beers in! Cheers and see you in Vegas!

"THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42): Arsenio Dev wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return.

Q1 2017 Rocket active stabilization system update; Finally have working PID for positional control of a DC motor! New gear, livestreams and the first program sponsor!

After nearly 4 and a half months of late nights, caffeine fueled jam sessions, one livestream(more on that later!) and more frustration than anticipated I FINALLY figured out implementation of PID for positional control of a DC motor with an encoder. More details after the break including a breakdown of problems I ran into, some shiny response graphs and most importantly; SOURCE CODE!?!?!

Motor control testbed using TB6612FNG motor driver

Prograde burn; I quit my day job to work at NASA

Yes you read that right, as of January 30th I am working at NASA Goddard as a student researcher in the earth sciences wing, specifically on the 4U Laser Hetrodyne Radiometer cubesat as a hardware/software engineering intern.

First official day on the job!

Holiday season 2016 general update and MAGFest panel announcement

Happy Hackerdays readers! Since the last update I've been absolutely slammed between life and projects which had a drastic balance change that took more time and energy away from the blog than I'd have liked but thanks to a few alterations it is looking like I'll be back on track to get updates out more frequently and have an increase in project progress.

Hackertree 2016, with even better gear and Wi-Fi LEDs!

Q3 2016 Rocket active stabilization system update, complete hardware redesign of fin drive system with bonus sketches and a needed disclaimer

The old and new designs, massive improvements to the overall design

Update time has rolled around again now that a good chunk of progress is completed on the Arduino based rocket stabilization system. This has taken a while since I've been busy with not only work but also getting the A+ certification in computer repair and completely reworking my current workstation. After much discussion with several other rocket tinkerers, the conclusion was reached that stresses on the servo spline itself would be quite considerable and may result in damage or inoperability. Based on force distribution I surmised that flanged bearings embedded in the system shroud tube would function as not only supports but also as smooth rotation points. With the challenge of a new fin drive train in mind, I set to brainstorming. My first thought was to use linkages connecting the servo to the actuation shaft, though it would increase the diameter of the system unless the servos were staggered which would also increase the overall height of the system. Stepper motors were considered, however as I was unable to find suitably sized units and the common 28byj-48 had too low precision and torque this too was eliminated from consideration. After those two ideas were discarded, it was relegated to the back burner while I had work. The breakthrough was about a week later, while browsing patents looking at missile fin drives I noticed an old Raytheon control segment used bevel gears to transfer the motion and that became the seed for the new design. 

Side projects update: Optical/radio telescopes, CAD, new rigs and custom sensor breakouts

Apologies for the radio silence on this blog, work has been continually crazy and some projects have been sidelined for temporary holds due to funding reallocation, however the backlog of completed short term projects has been full for a while and I thought I'd get some posted to tide you over until the next flagship update (Coming soon! Major redesign underway). Details on projects after the break, with a teaser for the flagship redesign at the end. 

8 inch Dobsonian telescope with craptastic eyepiece

How to theme and change the font of the Arduino IDE (Tutorial)

You've probably had this problem before; Writing code late at night trying to get new features to work but the bright white of the default IDE is burning your eyes and giving you a headache even with F.Lux installed, and/or you've mistaken a "l" for a "1". Well, there are solutions to those problems, but not the other well known problems (autocomplete, not enough debugging features, etc etc) after the break.

Original on left, rethemed and refonted on right

Q1 2016 Rocket active stabilization system update, now with fins, nose cone and a mockup

With 2016 well underway it's time for the first update on the state of the stabilization system!

First off, apologies for the massive delays this post has had, was originally slated for mid-Jan launch but between job hunting and other stuff I've been hitting delays and trouble at every turn. Since last semester ended on Dec 18th, I'd been going to TechShop pretty much every day until Jan 18th making massive leaps and bounds of progress along the way. The most obvious of progress is the completion of the demonstration mockup airframe which will be gone into more in-depth after the break. 

The system's current state on the demonstration mockup

Holiday update and gift exchange postmortem

Happy Hackerdays readers! Since the last update it's been busy with the first semester of school finishing up, finals and the holiday season quickly approaching. In that time I've made a better HackerTree, run a beta test of the Maker gift exchange, made the major purchase of an oscilloscope,  and received a box of goodies from Texas Instruments. First semester was a mess and I made a lot of mistakes along the way that will be a lot of work to get my grades up out of over the rest of my time at school. I've reactivated my TechShop membership and will be up there doing a lot of work until January 17th when it expires again. Full details on the updates and a little teaser of the stabilization system progress after the break.

Wishng you all a maker Christmas and a hacker new year!

Rocket active stabilization system debugging update

Debugging the system on a cheap logic analyzer clone (review coming up soon)

        Ever since I implemented the new control code this system has been plagued with a pair of bugs that frustrated me to no end which I have dubbed "Harlem Shake" and "Mr Freeze." The "Harlem Shake" bug occurs when the IMU outputs seemingly random YPR values suggesting that it is tumbling even when the sensor is kept perfectly still. "Mr Freeze" as the name suggests, is when the system locks up out of nowhere and refuses to respond unless reset which does not prevent the glitch manifesting. After mucking around with the code and a string of long nights with quite a bit of coffee trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with the system, I finally fixed the problem. The following is just inferences based on my limited knowledge at the moment, if anyone has a better theory I'd be glad to hear it. Reading the serial logs led me to believe that the freezing glitch was caused by a FIFO (First In First Out) overflow due to the appearance of that message in the terminal just before the system locked up. Initially, I had messed with the FIFO data speed configuration from 200Khz to 400Khz to no avail before inferring that the data was coming in at a much higher rate than it was being output, being a problem in library implementation. Using a logic analyzer had not showed anything anomalous in the I2C data bus which would have signaled a problem with either the wiring or packet structure. My assumption is that the transcoding of the data  internally was taking up too much processor power or was out of sync causing it to glitch thus causing the system to grind to a halt. This is a library-level issue that I'll be investigating and attempting to fix. Googling around proved library wonkiness to be the case and the fix was to increase the baudrate to the maximum of 115200. After applying this single line fix, the system ran for 10 hours straight without any bugs or freezing at all. I have no clue as to what causes the "Harlem Shake" glitch but it has not appeared since the freezing fix was applied so I'm not going to complain, though it has me curious as to what the core of the problem is.

Hackaday DC event recap

Giving a talk to the packed room

As some of you might have seen, I recently attended the Hackaday DC event and gave a talk on the rocket stabilization system while there in addition to explanations and demonstrations to quite a few people that came by my table. Surprisingly, the Amazon AWS crew that was there took quite an interest in my project and gave advice on code upgrades for the stabilization system, namely dynamic control movement ranges dependent on velocity.

A tour of Small Batch Assembly

Company logo on the orange walls

Recently I had met up with Bob Coggeshall at the inaugural National Maker Faire and he invited me to stop by the factory sometime in the future. I wasn't out in the general Reston area for a while until there was a conference over there. Sent him a tweet, and the following day drove over through the rather nice technology district.

Combination railgun/coilgun development platform (version .01 craptastic)

Coilgun with projectile

Way back in 8th grade summer and freshman year of high school I got bored and decided I wanted to make an electromagnetic accelerator so I went googling and did a ton of research. As I had zero budget I had to kludge together most of this from junk I had laying around. As a result of this, the efficiency and overall power are abysmal.

ICStation lootbag

Quite a big bag here!

Earlier this year I entered my active rocket stabilization system in the 2015 ICStation Arduino electronic design competition on a whim because there was a chance at winning some components and discounts. The following month, much to my surprise, I received an email informing me that I had been an Honorable Mention and won a $20 coupon for use in their store($40 minimum purchase required). After a bit of difficulty with the site (cannot use coupons on items that are already on sale, I tried to make a purchase during a site-wide sale) I placed my order, which arrived a week later using the free shipping option(which included a tracking number). I am extremely excited to get working on my next batch of projects using these modules.

Spring break TechShop progress

Near-final fin with correct blending

Over this recent spring break, I'd decided to forgo the archetypal partying of the Senior year and continue work on my projects. My primary objective was to redesign the fin so it could be used with the round metal servo horns for easier integration and sturdier mounting. The main issue I was having was the splines not printing due to the low resolution of the printer which meant the servos are unable to properly engage with the fin.

Workshop evolution and upgrades

In October of 2014 I moved to a new house which included space for a workshop which has been a huge upgrade for me, as I had been working in a sort of foyer at my old house.  I will be detailing the evolution and advancement of my workshop in addition to offering advice for building your own or upgrading an existing workshop.

Video workshop update (February 2015)

I thought I'd make a video tour of the workshop as I have a decent camera on my phone and it seems that workshops are a point of interest for quite a few makers. Excuse my messy shelves as I do not have anywhere near enough sorters or bins to keep all my equipment looking organized though I will be cleaning them up soon once I get some more containers

February rocket active stabilization system update

Stabilization system miniaturization

Due to school preventing me from spending days at TechShop to use their printers and CAD workstations (my school lacks a technical education program sadly and my computer is on OSX so I can't use Inventor on it until I figure out how to install windows on an external hard drive) I have not made much progress on the system as of late.

Fundamentalz PCB review

PCBs sent to me

//I apologize for the delays in post frequency, school is soaking up quite a bit of my time as I was applying to colleges and preparing for midterms. As I have a lot planned out for this blog and project, a lot of work is going on behind the scenes. Thanks for your understanding! 
Back again with another review! This time around it is a bunch of PCBs from the crew over at Fundamentalz who were gracious enough to send over a bunch for review after the new hardware post caught their attention. These were shipped blazing fast, arriving a mere 3 days after we corresponded.