March 19

Tribute to Ultimate PBJ
Two loaves emerged from a silver fridge
and peanut butter is on them both
And being hungry, long I stood
and thought about one as hard as I could
till my stomach hurt and I got the message;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim
because it was crunchy and wanted wear;
though as for that, the jelly there
had colored them both about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
on our desks, that early lunch snack.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubt if I should ever go back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two loaves diverged in a fridge, and I --
I took the one more toasted by,
and that has made all the difference!

2:53 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

Sean Reynolds' CX2 decommissioned
The WashUAV Project has decommissioned it's Blade CX2.
The project will be moved over to the more powerful indoor helicopter: the Blade CP Pro 2.

The Cx just couldnt carry the weight anymore " no pun intended ". It cant handle the weight of all the sensors required to get a good stable hover with preliminary tests. Also I desired the ability to keep the controller and mearly turn the AUAV's Autonomous control on and off. For all of these reasons the CX2 is no longer the platform.

I have a Blade 400, but that thing scares me! There is no way in hell I would hold onto it while my code attempts to control it. If a single blade hit me, it would break bones, and the thing is so powerful it would pull out of my hand with a flick of it's power. The B400 is actually for sale if anyone is interested. I've flown it 3 times, and crashed it twice :) I have it rebuilt at the moment and I have some extra spare parts. I will sell it for 50$ less than retail but give all the spare parts in the deal as well.

The New Platform: the CP Pro 2 is an Indoor helicopter. I can hold it while someone flys it, and its powerful enough to carry payloads of over 50 grams (I think) I still need to do testing. It's in my car at the moment.
This semester I'm taking a class on Machine Learning. I was not planning on furthering this project this semester since all of my friends kept asking me who I was; due to my absense the previous sememster. However, when we began to cover Neural Networks, a subject which has always facinated me, I discovered this could be a perfect application for Machine Learning. The plan is to gather my flying controls, and the sensor readings from accelerometers, gyros, compasses and proximity sensors, then build a Neural Net which can interperate the Sensor Data into my "expert controls". Obviously I will need to work on my flying first ;-).

Fianally,
If you have any ideas or advice, if you have previous experience or looking to learn something from mine; shoot me an email. Were all in this together. Lets put an arduino at the helm of a heli!

-Sean Reynolds <><


12:27 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

December 19

Decline of Microsoft
Hey,
I'm not sure if a human will be reading this but if you do: here are my thoughts.
First of all who am I?
My name is Sean Reynolds as you can tell from my email.
I am a developer who fell in love with .NET
I am often described as a microsoft fanboy. I used to own a laptop and desktop both with vista and an xbox elite. However since the vista release its grown buggy. Now I have a macbook air for my laptop, and I have windows 7 prebeta as my desktop. I have a downloaded version of VS08 at home to play with.

I am scared. I'm scared that I see alot of people buying apples as a trendy thing to do. Microsoft is no longer sexy to them. As more people buy apples and their development environment is free, i see developers switch over too. I already have a guy on my team whos a nut about apple, and i dont understand :)

This is how i think we could fix microsoft.

First of all fire everyone in your marketing department, and hire all new young energetic people.
There are features in Windows that I still dont know about, there are features in Office that are excellent but under-emphasized. Start showing people what your products can do. I am the only person i know (in my circle of friends) who is using an xbox as a media extender, yet there are 5-6 xboxs between us. I want iLife and iWork, NOT because they are more powerful, which they are not, but because i saw someone do something with them that i want to do too.

Look at the difference here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/default.aspx
http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/
Worlds of difference my friend. Windows is not sexy!

MARKET YOURSELF...

Secondly: drive the markets youre in. There are 3 to 5 companies in the pipeline for mobile phones. The question is who is going to have multi touch first? DRIVE that market. If you make an OS that handles multi touch then manufactures will look to their suppliers to make multitouch displays that they can use in their products. It is cheaper for you to program for a feature that you KNOW will be utilized than it is for people to ship phones with screens that are not being used to their potential. EVERYONES WAITING on you to drive that market forward. (By the way i love Mobile5 and although i want an iphone i wont ever get one because i like the software that people write for windows phones. I have PDAnet which allows me to take my laptop online using my WM5 phone. I love it)

Speaking on Mobile, there is no reason why IE should be in the state that it is for windows mobile. It is so old. Look at the work that NetFront is doing, and take some notes from their browser. Their's is possibly best on the market right now. I actually switched to the iPhone as soon as the 3g came out! It's better in every way!

Oh and finally. It seems like your marketing department dictates when things are release etc. Where i see google pushing things out like 1800GooG411 (try it, its amazing), I see them taking a hit on that. It doesnt make marketing sense. They have no advertising in it. I see this but yet at the same time it is marketing because i have showed that feature off to probably 15-20 different people, and they showed it off even more. If microsoft had that kind of a service they would make sure that you had to have a pay account before using it. Time and time i see microsoft slowing down their development cycle just to get a piece of marketing in the middle. FORGET IT, put it out, and if it gets popular then put advertisements on it. That way you never have to charge us you only charge companies. Example? In 2000 there was a version of MSN Messenger which had VOIP. THE FIRST VOIP I EVER SAW. NOT only that but it worked, worked really well. Very clear. Not 3-5 months into its free release MS yanked it not to be seen again for almost 5 years. WHY? with that out Skype would never have had a chance! why didnt you just push it? why didnt you put it everywhere and make new standards for communication. By now we could have it on our phones too using the internet to its full potential. BUT NO, now its a skimmed down version of what it used to be and its tucked away in an elite app of messanger LIVE which noone really knows even exists. its a shame!

8:07 AM GMT  |  Read comments(1)

December 11

The way the WashUAV all came together
The funny thing about this project is:


10:35 AM GMT  |  Read comments(3)

WashUAV
New Video on the Project Site
There is a new video on the updated project site for the Wash UAV!

You can also check it out on youtube: New Mixed Video
I hope you like it, its my first mixed video using iMovie!

The new video mixes the videos from the CX2 and from the Blade 400 (B400); with the demo of the first autonomous flight. Next I will put up a video of the helicopter making a longer flight than 6 seconds. But for now this will have to do. I owe all of my work to Sparkfun! If it were not for their site offering all of the parts in one clean shop; I would never have bought all the sensors that I did.



10:20 AM GMT  |  Read comments(0)