I’ve had the good fortune in the past year of cutting two trees down and making them land exactly where I wanted. This is a combination of watching many Youtube videos on the subject and other online research. I basically followed these instructions, below. The trees were already dead and one was hollowed out from…
RC Plane Crashes
My RC Plane hobby began when I was a kid and my Dad bought me a radio control glider. I crashed it on the first flight. We repaired it and I crashed it again and again. Then he bought me a motorized plane, which I learned how to fly a bit better. Fast forward to…
Flight Simulator Build
Way back in 2016, I started to get very interested in getting a pilots license. I had been casually using X-Plane prior to this, but now started to take it more seriously. I built a mediocre flight sim control panel using off the shelf hardware from Saitek at first. In 2017, I decided to enroll…
Drone Fun & Fails
I’ve been flying and crashing drones for a couple years now, got my FAA certification to fly commercially and recently renewed it. I studied for months, learning all about airspace, aerodynamics, weight and balance, FAA rules and radio communications. I spent the first two years flying with two Yuneec Typhoon H drones. Planning to fly…
DIY Synthesizer – Sigsaly-X
Back in April of 2016, I heard the 99% Invisible Podcast about speech synthesizers. It was an enlightening look at Bell Labs Voder, the first speech synthesizer, which debuted at the Worlds Fair, in 1939. We had speech synthesizers back in 1939! But most of this episode was dedicated to SIGSALY. This was the codename…
Winter Droning
I was on a site survey in Michigan City and wanted to get some shots of the lighthouse & pier with the ice floating by. I bought a Mavic 2 Pro last November and haven’t used it much yet, so this was a great opportunity to test what it could do and how long the…
Protokulture Sign
I forgot that I had made this sign for my friend John Michaels, at Protokulture. I had some leftover wood from another project and wanted to put it to good use. This was really a practice session to teach myself how to make signs like this. It ended up being much easier than I thought….
Merrily Sign
While cleaning a dam of dead leaves and branches in our creek, I pulled out the coolest old board. No idea where this came from, or how long it had been there (probably a couple years). It looks like the quintessential ‘rustic barn wood’ and was perfect for my next sign. I have been searching…
Arp Odyssey Repair – Part Two
Continued from Part One. Next step in the repair was to either replace or repair the 4023 filter. I wasn’t actually sure if it was broken or not, but thought it would be worth replacing the chips and capacitors anyway. On reviewing the schematics for board C, I confirmed that the high output line had…