Night Ranger Intro & mod's

Well we decided to get hold of a remote control helicopter for the lab and after much debate ended up with the electric night ranger by Venom Air Corp . Theses little beast's have a single highspeed engine and two micro servos as well as gyro assisted flight and to boot no explosive LIPO batteries to go boom. This little guy runs on a custom nimh cells running at 8.4 volts or 7 1.2 aaa cells i guessing, as its wrapped in black shrink wrap.
The set is "ready" to fly with just a few basic things to do, assuming you know how to fly (we dont).
The power cell needs to be charged and the controller needs AA cells, eight in fact. But these were in the box, (nice venom green branded ones too).
Their is a heap of diffrent blade decals and we advise you use the main rotor stickers as they actually help to keep the blades from getting damaged, we chipped a blade on a cardboard box of all things and the stickers and a bit of black electrical tape had us up and running in no time at all.



The Next thing to do is read the book while the cell is charging, and watch the video of why you need more area then this to fly in ! We have replaced the tail rotor retaining grommet with a piece of longer silicon hose to hold on better and reduce the chance of loosing it. We also resoldered and taped ver the tail rotor motor as we snapped off both cables flying around the back yard and smashing into a window at night ! whichi is why theres no video.
I also built a training frame and removed all the chassis stickers to clean up the look, lees toy, more drone. The last thing we did was to reroute the aerial around the tail of the helicopter to reduce damage and increase the amount of unwund wire. The aerial was getting frayed wrapped around the skids.
We are having hassles getting stable flight so the whole chassis needs to be rebuilt and centered better, this is a matter of undoing the carbon rods that make up the moat of the frames and resetting them with new silicon tube with more of it. We also managed to snap a skid on a hard landing which is now taped and glued so is working fine, but plans are in place to rebuild them (the skids) in carbon fibre square rod like the trainer frame, and i'll most likely build the frame into it as well saving more weight, and balancing it up easier.
ore on the chopper as we learn to fly, then add our 2.4ghz micro cam to the underside for some onboard crashes. i mean flights.

Terminator robot

Terminator robot
Originally uploaded by sprocket2cog.

This guy just popped yp in our local hobby store, a full size cast metal robot from the terminator line of robot, well terminators.
dosent do anything, but nice either way.

lego webcam hacked

lego webcam hacked
Originally uploaded by sprocket2cog.

This is the lego web camera from the old Vision command system hacked to an adaptor ring made from some pvc fittings, The lens is a 35mm SLR lens from RICOH and features a macro mode as well as a zoom function. This is an ideal starter lens as the macro lets you use it for close up of circuits to read part id numbers so you can reverse enginner the projects for your own evil designs.
The screws on the ring lock into the len's flanges that used to lock it to the camera body.
The screws are on 25-30 degree angles to allow the lens to be slightly moved in and out for ultra fine adjustment of the focal lenth which for this lens was around 2 inches. ( i think ?) been a while since i knocked up the ring adaptor.

Viper from microbric - power hack

viper from microbric power hack
Originally uploaded by sprocket2cog.

For all you viper owners out there looking for a way to add external power to your project so you dont need all those aaa cells , Heres the power mod for the board, just add your own 7-9 volt power supply to the robot, The red wire "no not the red wire !" solders to the switch block terminal as per the photo and the earth bolts into the holes in the board used to hold the battery boxes on, which you dont need now.

XBR-001 mirco edtion

For those observant people out there, you may have noticed that the photos of the laminated sections seem out os scale to the plans . Well they are, during the mock up I noticed that the body and chassis were out of scale so after a rethink based on other ideas in our little book of hacks and mods. I decided to cut the chassis down from 300 to 250mm for this first run, the body rings are the same size but it means that the height will be lower to the ground reducing the center of gravity as well.
This will mean less rings for the robot at first reducing the cost, but the bigger robot will allow the ame parts to be reused. think of this as a micro chassis that can later be used as a secon equipment bay or even an oversized head.

Latest Sony Robot Hit's The Street

Well since the end of our friend AIBO we have all wondered if sony was going to bring us something new. Well its not the real deal, but lets hope sony releases some of these guys for us to hack, I mean use..

Went looking for movies and found this little three part film for your pleasure, check out he other parts at youtube ( just click videos by this user

Robot Destruction Systems

So you want to get rid of that Furby or V2 robot and want a fun way o do it ? well how about this. I would love to see a robot flick this switch...

FURBY- The Choice for Terrorist Hit Squad's

Well a few weeks ago i happened to be on a plane heading for Melbourne when I noticed this little bit of infomation that might make you think twice about tha kid and his furby sitting next to you.
The Plane safety pamphlet in the plane had a little photo of furby with a cross though him, so I figured a little bit more investigation was in order, I dont normally read the plane safety stuff, I figure if I just run up and down shouting We are all going to die , then Ill be fine :)
So after looking more closely I was shocked to see that furby isnt allowed to be operated on board aircraft from this company ? What we yet havent worked out is if it;s because the little guy is really a walking time bomb, or if the annoying litle guy makes you all want to open the doors and jump out to get away... So dont take furbys on planrse or the Men in black are likely to haul your ass off to the little back room and probe your furby for contraband.
Poor guy, as if his life wasnt hard enough, with not having legs to run away from those little terrorists, i mean preschoolers. Happy hacking .

LEGO NXT Open Software Beta

Gostai has released it URBI for NXT beta for puplic use and has started a forum and support center at the site. The screenshots look good and I'm downloading it (3.6mb)in prep for my NXT set. I know I wasnt going to get more lego, but hey Its worth it just for the built in bluetooth controller. While i havent tried out the package yet, any free robot software is good robot software, so check it out
http://www.gostai.com/lego.html