Quadrotor helicopter

I have obviously been quite lacking in my personal blogging time. I have however spent some time and energy working on a semi-professional blog about a flying robot helicopter project that I stumbled into heading up. If you're interested, take a peek at my flying blades of death.

Here's a brief intro to the project: marketing-ish article

Or here's the actual blog (for the hardcore out there): blog

...I'm pretty sure that the only people who will see this update will be my lovely wife and her fab friends. To forewarn, I'd definitely start with the marketing article...the blog goes from normal to uber-geek in a few micro-seconds.

Yay for my boards from China!

Much to my surprise, my circuit boards for the temperature controller came in from BatchPCB yesterday. I must say that it's actually quite impressive that I have them...especially since the website says that they haven't shipped yet. It's that crazy new non-causal shipping, packages arrive before they were ever shipped. Wormholes...must be...

Of course I was like a 3-year-old on Christmas day. I obviously couldn't just let them sit on my desk unused and untested, so of course I had to start populating one. It turns out that I made a little error in my circuit layout and didn't get all of the grounds tied together properly, but a simple jumper wire fixes that problem...and I'm back in business. I haven't put the board completely through the ringer, but it works! Wahoo for a working temp controller on a professionally made board! Now, who wants one?

It's important to note that much like the kid on Christmas, I was also not able to sleep last night. I just laid there thinking about my new toys...and what I could do with them...and where I could use them to make cool things happen...and...and...and...damn my overactive brain.

Now that I have the boards back, I can finally polish up a legit writeup.

Firing up the smoker

Two weekends ago I failed miserably at finding a pork shoulder to cook. The sad little package of meat that HEB sold me as"Boston Butt" was in fact not a single chunk of pork but instead a packages of slices of shoulder. The liquid was cloudy, the meat was slimy, and it smelled like the buzzards should be more interested in it than I should. It quickly went into the trash.

I had resigned myself to being stuck in the land of beef-only smoked meat. Needless to say, I was very excited to find a real, bone-in, freshly cut pork shoulder on my trip to the grocery mid week.

Friday afternoon I tossed it in a brine and Saturday morning around 10 it went on my smoker to put the controller through its paces. After a little troubleshooting, things were good to go...and 10 hours later that delicious chunk of meat to the left came off the smoker...mmmmmmm....pulled pork...

Temperature Controller

I've decided to take my first step into publishing the projects that I work on. I'm not sure what would comprise the perfect forum for sharing my tinkerings, but I think this might be a start.

My first really interesting project is a temperature control unit that originally was destined to control my Alton Brown-inspired ceramic electric smoker (unofficial instructions). When following the original directions, the temp control knob is buried way down in the unit and is prone to failure (not to mention burnt hands during adjustment). My second iteration moved the control knob off the electric heating element in the bottom of the smoker and put it on the wall, half of the way up the flower pot, and that worked well until the smoke and heat caused the contacts on the bi-metalic "thermostat" switch to start to die. I decided that there had to be a better way.

Somewhere along the lines I had picked up a packet of 3 K-Type thermocouples (produce a very small voltage based on the difference in temperature between the two ends of the wire pairs) that had been used in some sort of thermodynamics lab. After a lot of tinkering, and embedded controlling a first generation was born and the fruits of my labor are shown at left.

However, being the consummate tinkerer, I couldn't handle stopping there. A writeup of the next version will likely take the form of an instructable; however, a draft currently resides on my picasa page if you're interested (link).