Marc's Public Blog

Those who know me are probably wondering why I didn't get the P90D, the faster one with beefier rear motors, or even the ludicrous speed version (a mere $15,000 extra to shave off 0.3 seconds on 0-60), and there are a few answers:

So, here is what I got:

We went to the Fremont Numi plant on black friday (the roads were empty), to pick up the car and get a factory tour:

The Fremont Numi Factory is huge

before driving it off

happily home

Nice 2 tone interior

I had it drive itself using autopilot back from 680 to 1mn from my house on hwy 85 and only had to take the wheel twice to switch freeways. That's a huge plus in my book :)

Thanks to Elaine, and the snow not falling at night all the way down to 2000ft altitude as was originally forecast (this would have extedend the drive by 1H or so). So we were in the lift lines just before the lifts opened by 09:00 (cornice was a bit late as usual on poweder days).

Not surprisingly, I ran into Johannes before long, and the 3 of us rode together most of the day.

The snow was nice and light, but of course coverage underneath off trail was marginal in places, so when I went to hunt powder in my typical places, many rocks were encountered. Sadly on my last run in palisades, one hidden rock caught my board, and I landed chest first on another one. I'm now on advil and will see how long I'll have a reminder from this little incident :)

plenty of cars and people were there by the time we arrived, way before the lifts opened

Chamoix was nice, except for that small bit

Johannes complained a bit :)

snow making...

partners in crime :)

Despite the many rocks, it was a fantastic start of the season. Again, a big thanks to Elaine for getting us there and back.

6.7V input from the batteries, taken down to 5V with LM voltage regulator

The problem was that my motion activated lights actually used quite a bit of power when doing nothing, so their batteries would die after 1-3 months without them being used: This nice bright light has an RF receiver that needs to be powered all the time, sucking power:

This light is even worse, it uses more than 500mA when fully bright, and uses an infrared LED to detect hand swipes. That burns 3mA, killing batteries in less than a month:

My meter shows more than 0.5A when full bright:

Small show and tell video:

This is the ghetto end result in the shed, but it works :)

In the end, I did have to replace the LM voltage regulator with a better one from pololu, 2.5A 5V with less than 1mA quiet use. This allowed the batteries not to be used up into a voltage regulator doing nothing :) Then, I also had to put the voltage/amp display on an off switch, as it was using another 15mA just to display those values. Now, everything is happy :)

If you are interested in that, I also wrote a page on the smaller Brotronics PowerTowerRX without diversity

It's a great LRS module. On top of having the diversity receiver:

Sadly, the author seems to provide absolutely 0 support for his module, and the documentation was minimalistic to say the best. Yet, it's a great little board, but sadly it comes with virtually no instructions, and the author hasn't replied to any of my Emails. I did figure out how to use it in the end, but it took longer than it should have, so I'm going to do the documenting work here:

you can see both dipole antennas at a 90 degree angle

the buzzer tells me if TX signal is lost, and acts as a lost model finder

What's not clear from the instructions is that the labelled RSSI pins will not work at all as shippped. I had to cut open the very nice plastic wrap, and hidden under the instructions sheet, in the upper right, you have to bridge 2 pads with solder. I did not get analog RSSI to work, but digital RSSI (i.e. what you'd get from an Frsky receiver, and it requires a capacitor and resistor to get a proper analog signal out of it), worked.

Too bad I had to cut all of this open to get working RSSI :(

This is the single instructions sheet that comes with the device. It has most of what you need, but the pinout is not super clear (I thought the top pins were opposite from what they were after seeing the picture below. Have a look at the video for a better overview of how this all works.

All in all, it's a really nice board, but the limited instructions, and lack of an accessible jumper to get RSSI, is a pity. As to why RSSI isn't even soldered to work at all when you receive the board, I have no idea.
Wiring is not super obvious, and neither is how everything works, so this little video should be worth a thousand words:

If you are using Ardupilot on Pixhawk, some relevant notes:

Here's the RX configuration screen:

Update 2015/12/23: Kudos for Tomas Chladek for having stepped up and added USB support to his Mobius ActionCam and app. Thanks to him, and for a very reasonable price, one can update/reconfigure mobius cameras in the field without a computer.

Original post:
Sigh, I was on the field with my RC plane and need to change the contrast on my mobius cameras before taking off, and when I started Mobius USB Tools, I was greeted by a screen that said it wasn't supported anymore and that I had the option of uninstalling it.
Well, crap....

I just spend a few hours today looking into WTF happened, and sadly the author, therau2000@videotron.ca deliberately sabotaged his very nice app and screwed all his users in the process.
What seems to have happened is that he was hoping to get money from mobius for each camera sold in return of his work. To be fair, he did put in a lot of work, and the result was a great app that helped a lot of people. I write open source myself and give it away to help others too, so I know how this works, well except that I've likely spent less time on it and also I don't expect compensation in return
Mobius apparently declined to provide whatever compensation he asked for (or maybe it was an ultimatum or shakedown, hard to say), and in turn he decided to kill his app and screw all his users who would have been happy to give him money for his work, but never were given the chance to.

This is where the app used to be: https://web.archive.org/web/20150708002619/https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=therau2000.amcamobiusac

I checked http://www.appdownloader.net/Android/App/81629/therau2000.amcamobiusac to see if I could just go back to an earlier APK that wasn't sabotaged, but I found out that he clearly had planned to do this a long time ago and sabotaged all his apks so that they would not work when a new version was out. I've gone all the way back to 'Mobius USB Config (aMCA) 7.0.0.4' from 2014, and it tells you to upgrade to a newer version instead of working. I tried a few versions in the middle of none of them worked in a useful fashion, even in airplane mode.

Obviously the author has the right of screwing over all his users like he did, but it's really a dick move, and instead of being mad a mobius like he was hoping I/we'd be, I'm mad at him for throwing away his good work, and screwing all his users. While http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:U9hpWobhL5kJ:pages.videotron.com/therau20/nr16/android.html+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us claims "There has never been any intention on my part to hurt any of the 16,160 Mobius USB Tools Users", that is exactly what he did. Saying otherwise on a web page is BS.

Sadly, the replacement options aren't as good. You can get https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cz.chladek.mobiusactioncam but it doesn't have the code to mount the sdcard via USB, it's meant for you to put the microusb card from your mobius inside your phone (this has now been fixed, please use this app).
If your phone is rooted, in theory you can use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.chainfire.stickmount to mount your mobius locally and hope the other app lets you edit the settings directly.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vaultmicro.camerafi&hl=en is supposed to let you see video from camera (press the recording button after plugging the mobius in to switch to webcam mode).

I personally would prefer that someone hacks the last good known version of therau2000.amcamobiusac and removes the disable code. Anyway, sad state of affairs for mobius and android users.

That said, for now, my workaround is to use my rooted phone where I can run stickmount if everything works well, then it mounts the mobius under /sdcard/usbmount/sda1 where in turn the "mobius actioncam" app can mount a syscfg.txt file that I first need to create with long press menu, long press power on (with camera unplugged). I've also verified that long press on the camera button does turn the camera into webcam mode, and then it works with 'camera fi' to see where the lens in pointing.
(on a good day it also seems that my marshmallow phones can mount the mobius as a usb storage device, only using basic OS support, but I have no idea where it's mounted, and that feature doesn't seem to be reliable at all)

This was however not easy to setup at all because geofencing is not really designed with that use case in mind in APM::Plane. As discussed in this bug: https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot/issues/2984 , in arducopter you can simply set an altitude limit but not in Arduplane.

So, what you need to do is the following:

You're not done though, now you have to upload a useless geofence area or nothing will work. As per http://plane.ardupilot.com/wiki/geofencing/ , I uploaded a geofence as big as the US, and put the geofence return point in the middle of the ocean.
The end result is that the geofence return point is too far, so when guided mode kicks in, it looks for a rally point, I have none, and then falls back to the RTL/takeoff point, which is what I wanted.

Sadly, though, I was only able to setup that useless geofence area with mission planner.

So there you go, this can be made to work, but apparently you have to use mission planner (which means Virtualbox for me since I'm on linux), and you need to setup a huge polygon, a gence return point that is very far away from where you'll ever fly, and make sure that you do set FENCE_MAXALT or FENCE_MINALT won't work (which seems to be a bug, as of AP 3.4).

Highlights:

Destinations: I got to do other nice real cross country flights with nice destinations I woudn't have driven to:

Unexpected experiences in 10 years:

Engine Failure After Landing

Lowlight?
I flew my first 200H in 1H, 500H within the first 5 years, but only flew 127 hours in the second 5 years.
Yeah, that's kind of sad in one way, but I kind of know why. It's a combination of:

Does that mean I'm getting a sucky and rusty pilot? I would hope not. While I might not be able to do the best heavy crosswind landings due to lack of practise, or hard IFR, I at least feel that I continue to be capable of flying in weather, or in a pitch dark night, so my flying seems to be enough to keep my skills, so that's good news.

And as parting words, some of my bestof bestof pictures:

flying over the great barrier reef in Australia

flying a trike over kawaii

being towed in a glider

Air Combat USA

An obvious thing to do is to fly the San Francisco Bay Tour:

on a bay tour, we used to hold by the racetrack waiting for a bravo clearance. Now, it's been replaced by a bunch of condos :(

Stanford

SFO airport

Of course, we are super lucky to live close to the Sierras with so much nice scenery:

Lee Vining

Mono Lake

Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite

Hetch Hetchy is too full and drained

Then, Vegas and the Grand Canyon sure isn't bad either:

North Las Vegas

The hoover dam before they built the bypass bridge

Later, the bridge was built

walk over the grand canyon cliff

Other Misc pictures:

landing at Catalina airport

flying over LAX airport

Mt Rushmore

landing at Oshkosh...

Moffett, back when it had a blimp

Yellowstone

Glacier Park

Salt Lake City's Salt Lake

Hawaii road taken over by lava

Lava meeting the water

Another road to nowhere

Molokini Crater in Maui

Mt Haleakala in Maui

Awesome craters

Mt St Helens Volcano, Washington

Castle AFB and Museum

Flying over Dordogne, France

New Apple Campus

Moffett Wind Tunnel

Burning Man

Weather and Sunsets:

crashing wave

And that was it for 10 years, here's to the next 10 years! :)

Lots of fun and different cars. I only got down to a 1:41 this time (a bit slower than last time), but it was still fun. It probably was a combination of my definitely worn tires, and lack of skill :)

drivers' meeting

Session #4 on viewsync

By the end of the day, I climbed up the hill to fly my RC plane as the sun was setting, go see RC Flying over Laguna Seca, 6 years later:

Again, more pictures from the sky on my RC Flying over Laguna Seca, 6 years later page.

Little climb up

My gear, ready to go

rear cam on 1st flight takeoff

climbing up the hill, gave me a reasonable vantage point on the entire track

By the time I started, everyone had driven out or was driving out already. As a result, the paddocks were a bit bare already:

And here is a list of Laguna Seca's turns from a few different angles:

T1

T1-T2-T3-T4

T2-T3

T4-T5

T4 seen from the rear

T5

T5 from the rear

T6

T6

T7

nice little hill on the side of T7

T8-T9-T10-T11

T8

T8-T9

Cool to see where the bridge before T9, goes

T9 from the rear

T10 from the rear

T10-T11

T11, definitely sharp... Never noticed you could drive off the track to an access road on the right

I then went flying a bit away from the track towards the fog that was rolling in. That was my first time flying VFR on top without actually being very high. I'm glad I was flying with instruments (IFR-like) though.

The flight videos aren't great due to video quality, and my rear camera that was acting up (I replaced the mobius with another one since then), but here they are if you'd like them. The viewsync composite (front/rear) are a bit more interesting: