Blog

Rigid Router DIY CNC

An open-source design and build-guide for a rigid router CNC machine for milling aluminum and other materials.

Drying Your 3D Printer Filament

How does drying your 3D printer filament improve print quality?

Creality K1C 3D Printer

A review of the Creality K1C 3D printer, a CoreXY machine with a 300x300x350mm build volume.

3D Printer Material Tests

Tensile strength testing procedure and results for a range of 3D printer filaments.

G0704 Ballscrew and Spindle Upgrades

This article covers the ballscrew and spindle upgrade to my G0704 Mill.

TIG Welding in the Home Shop

This is a guide to TIG welding in the home shop.

CFOCer VESC V6 BLDC Motor Controller Setup Guide

CFOCer VESC V6 Brushless Motor Controller Flashing and Setup Guide.

From 3D Printing to Machining Metal Parts

This article walks through the conversion of a g0704 mini mill to a CNC machine using LinuxCNC. I avoid the cost of a ballscrew conversion and instead use software backlash compensation with the stock ballscrews and am still able to achieve great results.

The FluxLamp Soldering Reflow Oven

This post contains an overview and build guide for the FluxLamp soldering reflow oven. Built with a Vertile PowerCore, the FluxLamp is designed to be inexpensive, easy to make and easy to use. I hope this project will enable makers and hackers to start doing their own reflow soldering!

PowerCore Dev Board

Tired of playing with safe, low voltage, dev boards? Want complete control over your AC powered device. How about WiFi programmability, remote logging, integrated temperature sensing, an LCD and more!? The PowerCore is what you need! This blog post covers the features of the PowerCore and walks through the story of why and how it was developed.

Klipper 3D printer Firmware

I have been exploring different firmware options for my TronXY X5S 3D Printer and Klipper is interesting in that it runs the CNC control on a single board computer (SBC) and uses the 3D printer's control board as a motor controller. I've also added a touchscreen display to the SBC running Klipper for easy printer control.

ESP3D WiFi Enable your 3D Printer

Let's add WiFi to the TronXY X5S 3D Printer (or any printer for that matter) for only a few dollars!

Stanford JackRabbot2 - 360° 2D to 3D Multi-Target Tracker

This post follows from a project at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab, where I've been working for some time, and serves as documentation for our social navigation robot's onboard multi-target person-tracker I developed under the guidance of Roberto, Marynel, Hamid, Patrick, and Silvio.

Making a UHF 433mhz Inverted Vee Antenna Set

Here's a quick guide to build your own Inverted Vee antenna.

TronXY X5S Build Guide

This is a build guide and review for the large format TronXY X5S 3D printer.

Silent Stepper 3D Printer Upgrade (and other noise mitigations)

My printer sits in a closet that shares a wall with our bedroom. Normally it's fine, but when things are quiet I can hear the motors making slight buzzing and ringing noises with the normal A4988 Stepper Motor Drivers. In an attempt to make the printer entirely silent, I got four TMC2100 stepper motor drivers. At $10 each, they're expensive, but wow, they are awesome. This is an installation and configuration guide for those drivers.

NOX Flight Controller 180mm Build

This is a build guide for a drone based on the NOX flight controller, a full-featured F4 flight controller with integrated OSD and 4x BLHeli 32 ESCs, DSHOT, and telemetry.

Flashing Kiss 24a ESCs with DSHOT firmware via BetaFlight Passthrough

This guide assumes you have a flight controller running BetaFlight connected to KISS 24A ESCs. Alternatively, use a USB-UART converter to program the ESCs.

Run Jupyter Notebook behind a nginx reverse proxy subpath

I would like to run Jupyter on a server with some other apps running on an nginx server. This guide covers the configuration of the Jupyter notebook behind the reverse proxy at the path "/groot"

Mostly Printed CNC (MPCNC)

This is my build log of Vicious1's Mostly Printed CNC.

Getting Started with ROS Kinetic and ROS on Ubuntu 16.04

I'm starting to experiment with px4 off-board control. These is a setup guide for running a Pixracer with OrangePi on 16.04 with ROS Kinetic.

FPV Goggle Guide, FatShark Setup

A while back I reviewed a bunch of box style goggles. These single-screen goggles are generally more cost effective, but bigger and less comfortable on the face. This time around I got a couple dual-screen goggles, e.g. FatSharks to try out and see if they're worth the money.

FPV Camera Comparison

I was curious what the best camera low light camera for the money is, so I ordered a bunch of low-light FPV cameras and tried them out. This article details what I found.

Betaflight 3.2 and F7 Flight Controllers

As of Jul 31, 2017, 2:26 PM PDT, Betaflight 3.2 is in the Release Candidate stage and with this release, F7 flight controllers have arrived. While an F7 MCU is not entirely necessary, not yet anyway, having a very fast and very capable MCU is future proof. I expect some of the most exciting new performance features in Betaflight will target the F7 MCU. This article is an overview of the current F7 landscape.

Asguard AIO

The Asguard flight controller is an OmnibusF4 with an integrated 4-in-1 ESC. This is a build guide for an Asguard based quadcopter.

Cleaning up the Ubuntu boot volume

If you've been using an `apt update && apt upgrade`-ing a linux system for a while, you may be running out of space on you /boot volume. This is a quick tip to show you how to clear up space by deleting old and unused kernels.

Orange Pi Zero Google Cloud Print Server

This guide will show you how to turn an Orange Pi Zero into a Google Cloud Print server.

STM32CubeMX Makefile project

STM32CubeMX is a cool little code generation tool from STM that helps you choose the pinout for you microcontroller project given the pin assignment constraints of a given CPU. The only problem is that it doesn't allow you to generate a Makefile project for use with the arm-none-eabi- toolchain.

BetaFlight Micro Brushless Aurora 100

The Aurora 100 is a micro brushless quadcopter from Eachine, similar to the Falcon120. It's no less powerful than the Falcon 120, however it's lighter and therefore more nimble. This new class of very small, sub 250g drones is exciting as no FAA certification is required to fly them.

Unlocking STM32 Chips

If you run into weird issues flashing your STM32 board, it might be because the board is locked.

Taranis Q X7 Review, Teardown and Setup

The Taranis Q X7 is an awesome new radio from FrSky that is budget priced, just over $100 and stocked full of premium features like a backlight screen, audio output, an SDCard for tons and tons of models and not to mention, ever switch is 3-position.

DJI Mavic Pro

I just got my first DJI drone, the Mavic Pro. Coming from the miniquad scene, the features on the Mavic are amazing. This article will walk through the unboxing and setup. I hope that an absolute beginner can use this as an easy walk through to get everything needed to setup and get flying.

Falcon 120

The Falcon 120 is a micro, brushless x-configuration quadcopter. This is a review and setup guide.

Easy 3D Printer Upgrades

I recently made some improvements to my Geeetech Prusa i3 3D Printer. These quick and easy upgrades provide a massive improvement in build ease and quality.

The Taranis Q X7 is Real

The Taranis Q X7 has hit the FCC Database. It's real and from the features below, it looks awesome!

SiFive Risc-V Development Setup

Risc-v is the new hotness and the SiFive FE310 is the first open source risc-v hardware SOC. This is a guide to start developing for this chip or FPGA.

RunCam Owl Plus Teardown

This is an unboxing and tear down of the RunCam Owl Plus.

Flash BLHELI_S with DSHOT using BlHeli-Configurator

The BlHeli configurator by @diehertz is here! And so is the beta version of DSHOT for BLHELI_S. In this guide I'll tell you a little bit about what I've learned from diehertz about BLHELI_S and how to flash your own ESCs.

BeeRotor u130 UltraWhoop Micro Racer

In this article, I walk through the iterative design process of building my ultimate micro racer. I took a BeeRotor u130 and custom printed some parts (links below) to turn this into a bigger, faster TinyWhoop that I'm calling the UltraWhoop. Here is is next to it's smaller counterpart, the eWhoop.

OmnibusF4 and the BFOSD

This is an overview of the OMNIBUS F4 flight controller and BetaFlight OSD (BFOSD) which I developed and implemented.

Grasshopper F210 RTF Quadcopter Review

This is a review and setup guide for the [Grasshoper F210 Quadcopter](http://goo.gl/qhVtlB).

Omnibus F3 Pro

This is an overview of the new OmnibusF3 Pro from Airbot.

DIY 4 in 1 Module with ER9X

This is a setup guide for the 4-in-1 radio module.

The Ultimate Micro Quadcopter Guide

This article is an intro to the world of brushed-motor micro quadcopters. I've tried out a few and share some thoughts below.

Geeetech Prusa I3 X Build Guide

I just got my first 3D printer, the Geeetech Prusa I3 X. This post details my experience as a 3D printing newbie from unboxing, assembling and using this 3D printer. First, let me show you what this printer can do.

BetaFlight Kiss Flight Controller

This guide will show you how to install BetaFlight on your Kiss FC.

J-Link Getting Started Guide

These are my notes on J-link debugging, mostly for ARM.

Airbot F3S AIO Flight Controller and Typhoon 4-in-1 ESC

This is a quick overview of the Airbot F3S AIO Flight controller and Typhoon 4-in-1 Pro ESC.

FlySky i6 Radio Setup and Hacking Guide

This is my unboxing, review and hacking guide for the Flysky FS-i6 2.4ghz radio transmitter.

BetaFlight Spektrum Satellite Receiver Guide

This guide will walk you through setup of a Spektrum RX Satellite. I'll show you how to bind it with your transmitter using betaflight version 3.1.6 and newer. I'll be using an OmnibusF4 in my example.

Omnibus Flight Controller and Airbot Typhoon 180 Miniquad Build

This is a review, build and setup guide for the Airbot Typhoon 180 Miniquad with the brand new OmnibusF3 flight controller that I designed in collaboration with Airbot.

HobbyKing Quanum V2 Pro Goggles

Drone Building 101 with the HobbyKing FPV Starter Setup

At Maker Faire Bay Area 2016, David, Jack, Huned and I built a drone with the help of some kids. This is the story of building that drone.

STM32 hardfault debugging

Programming a microcontroller is a bit different than programming on a PC. Error messages aren't nicely propagated to a terminal or GUI.

Rctimer BeeRotor u210 mini quad build, setup and review

This is a build and setup guide for the BeeRotor u210.

AirBot Flip32 F3 AIO Lite and Typhoon 4-in-1 ESC

This is a review and build guide for a mini drone based on the AirBot Flip32 F3 AIO Lite and Typhoon 4-in-1 ESC.

DYS X160 v3

This is a review and setup guide for the DYS x160 v3 miniquad.

HobbyKing Graphene and Bolt High Voltage LiPo Battery Analysis

This is a performanc analysis of 3s 2200mah Graphene and 4s 1300mah Turnigy Bolt batteries.

Drone Building at Maker Faire Bay Area 2016

If you live in the SF Bay Area, come to Make Faire on May 20-22, 2016 and build a drone with me! I'll be hosting an exhibit called "Drone Building 101" where I'll be helping folks build their own FPV mini-quad.

Rctimer BR-X200 Mini-quad Build, Setup and Review

This is a review, build and setup guide for the Rctimer Beerotor X200.

AVR Dissassembly

This is a quick tip on disassembling AVR binaries via radare2

Victory230 FPV Mini-quad Setup and Review

This is a setup guide and review of the Rctimer Victor230 FPV mini-quad.

FrSky RX SBUS and Frsky DJT Module

This is a review, setup guide and comparison of the two Airwolf DIY FrSKY Receivers (F801 and F802), both paired with the DJT Transmitter module in my 9x. This article also takes a look at the Naked X4R receiver from FrSky.

HMDVR and Eachine ProDVR FPV Video Recorder

This is a review of the new HMDVR FPV Video Recorder. Note this also applies to the Eachine ProDVR, which has the same internals.

Rctimer BeerotorF3 Flight Controller

This is a review and setup guide for the new BeerotorF3 (BRF3) all-in-one (AIO) flight controller from Rctimer.

Flying Sony NEX Micro 4/3rds Camera

So, you want a flying camera to take videos of you and your awesome friends doing amazing things. You've thought about getting one of those pre-built drones by DJI or 3D Robotics, but those are expensive little drones that only carry weak little cameras. Building a giant rig to carry your full frame DSLR isn't ideal either, because it will need to be huge and therefore less portable. So what should we do? Build something to carry our NEX-5T micro 4/3rds camera! This camera weighs 397g with the standard lens and the video can be viewed and the camera controlled over Wi-Fi, ideal for when we're in the air.

Q600 Quadcopter

In this review, build and setup guide we will walk through building and configuring the Q600 quadcopter from Rctimer.

ASP micro 4/3rds Gimbal and SimpleBGC 32-bit Gimbal Controller

This is a detailed build and setup guide for the Rctimer ASP 3-Axis Brushless Gimbal.

PixHawk Flashing and Setup

This guide will show you how to install, flash and configure the PixHawk. I'll be using Rctimer's distribution of the PixHawk, which is called the FixHawk. From now on, I'll use these terms interchangeably. The FixHawk will be installed and configured in an Rctimer Q600 quad-copter, which I highly recommend if you're looking for an awesome frame, but these directions should apply to any quad-copter installation and configuration.

BlHeli ESCs

This guide will show you how to flash BlHeli and the BlHeli bootloader so they can be programed via CleanFlight or BetaFlight pass through programming in BlHeli Suite.

BlHeli ESC Upgrading and Configuration

This guide will show you how to configure your ESCs with the optimal settings for use with OneShot125, CleanFlight or BetaFlight.

BlHeli CleanFlight ESC Calibration

This quick guide will explain how to calibrate your ESCs so they throttle up evenly.

Rctimer Micro 160 BeeRotor Build, Setup and Review

This is a review and build guide for the BeeRotor 160mm from Rctimer.

Flashing SiLabs xRotor 20a with BlHeli via C2 4w-if

This guide describes how to flash the BlHeli and the BlHeli Bootloader to XRotor 20a ESCs so that they can be updated via CleanFlight and BetaFlight after installing them in your multi-rotor, without unplugging them from the flight controller.

Rctimer OZE32 / RTFQ Flip32 AIO Integrated Flight Controller Review and Setup

This article is an in-depth review and setup guide for the Rctimer OZE32 aka RTFQ Flip32 AIO.

MultiRotor Setup Checklist

After I finish soldering a new copter or make a significant change, like updating the flight controller firmware, I always have to review the remaining setup steps to ensure a safe first flight.

ST-LINK flash and debug on the SPRacingF3

I was having trouble flashing BetaFlight to my SPRacingF3 board, so I used the SWD port to load the firmware. This guide covers that process.

Fixing an Arduino 0x000000 Error

The Arduino invalid id "0x000000" error could be caused by setting the wrong fuses, resulting in the oscillator not running. This guide will show you how to fix that issue.

GPS VK16U6 CleanFlight Setup

This is a quick guide on how to install the VK16U6 GPS on a CleanFlight or BetaFlight controller.

Go FPV Latency Testing

I've seen lots of skepticism about the latency of my Go FPV app, which allows folks to use their phone, instead of goggles, to fly FPV.

Migrating to Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR)

I recently migrated some of our data pipelines from our local Ambari manged cluster to Amazon Elastic Map Reduce to take advantage of the great cluster startup times, allowing scalable bootstrapping of clusters as necessary (and their subsequent termination).

Building Cleanflight on Ubuntu 14.04

Naze32 ST-Link Debugging

This is a quick guide to building and flashing CleanFlight via ST-Link.

Decompiling an APK

A quick guide on APK decompilation via apktool.

Wireless Video Tx/Rx FPV Channels

My notes on the various video channels implemented in several popular FPV transmitters and receivers.

Setup OrangeLRS with OpenLRSng

This is a setup guide and overview of the OrangeLRS module.

Go FPV Goggles

This is a build guide for my DIY 3D "Go FPV" goggles. They have much higher resolution, depending on your phone, than Fatsharks and are waaaay cheaper as well. What is the resolution of these goggles you ask? Using my Nexus 5, which runs at 445 PPI 1080p IPS, that's 1920x1080 pixels. The screen is split between both eyes, so each eye gets 960x1080. Plus, if you have 2 cameras, they're capable of realtime 3D video.

FPV250 with Cleanflight, Minimosd, OpenLRSng and a Xiaomi Yi GoPro Clone

I've just got the last few bits of my first FPV250 working. Here's how to build your own FPV250 for under $200 (not including the camera). First a few photos of what you'll end up with at the end of this article.

Flashing BlHeli on HobbyKing BlueSeries 12a ESCs With a Chinese Arduino Nano Clone

This article is essentially the same as my article on flashing HobbyKing's F20 ESCs, so check that article out for the walk through. I even used the same programmer setup, leaving my original intact by adding the leads to the breadboard.

Flashing NodeMCU on the ESP8266

This is a quick guide on flashing an ESP8266 module via NodeMCU.

Ebay HC-05 Bluetooth Setup Guide

This is a quick guide on setting up the HC-05 and HC-06 bluetooth modules commonly available on ebay.

3D Camera on the Tricopter

We built a tricopter and put a DIY 3D camera on it!

ProRes editing in Premier

A quick tutorial on setting up ProRes editing in Premier.

Xiaomi Yi -- The Ant Camera

This is a guide to the Xiaomi Yi action camera.

Minim OSD

Putting together the flight controller for my first mini quad I decided on setting up a full-featured OSD.

Flashing BlHeli on HobbyKing F20 ESCs With a Chinese Arduino Nano Clone

This guide will walk you through installing BlHeli and the BlHeli bootloader on HobbyKing F20 ESCs.

Handling Dates in Hadoop Pig

Importing dates with pig into hive from a csv can be tricky. Depending on the format, the default datetime pig parser likely won't work.

LiPo Battery Price Analysis

When trying to decide what size batteries to get for my new mini-quad, I did some pricing analysis, starting with hobbyking.com. Since ordering from hobbyking is always a bit of a gamble, I hope to add a few more suppliers soon and get a relative view of pricing across the landscape. I am curious about the actual pack composition. If anyone knows what manufacturers (aka, factories) make these, shoot me an email. I'd love to talk to them directly and find out if there is any real difference between brands and suppliers.

ADB over WiFi (aka, how do I debug when using USB host mode?)

Enable ADB over WiFi to debug applications that require a USB connection to a different device.

Mounting a VHD NTFS image on Ubuntu

I recently had a windows backup in vhd format stored on an EXT3 drive, only readable by my Ubuntu VM. Don't ask me how this happened, but I need to pull a few files off the backup.

Ubuntu on the Beaglebone Black

How to flash Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 to the Beaglebone Black.

Configuring the HK-T6A for a Flight Simulator

This guide will show you how to configure your Hobby King 2.4Ghz 6Ch Tx & Rx V2 transmitter as the input to your flight simulator. I'm using the excellent and free RC Desk Pilot with the FT Old Fogey model to practice flying my Smash Drone.

A complete noob's guide to RC

I built a DIY RC plane to learn more about flight and embedded electronics.

DropCam on a Captive Portal

This article is better titled, "how to impersonate a MAC" or "how to spoof a MAC on a Mac." So you're at a hotel and want to use the DropCam you brought along to keep an eye on the baby while you kick it in the next room. Only issue is that the hotel makes you enter your room number and a password they've given you, in a captive portal. What do you do?

Java reversing tips

A short primer on Java reversing.

Optimizing Postgresql

This is quick guide on updating the PostgreSQL 9.3 defaults to improve performance.

nginx ssl chained certs

rails log tagging

mysql permissions

reset mysql slave

Find and replace non-breaking spaces in vim

You've copied and pasted into an html text editor only to find weird things going on in the browser. Lines aren't wrapping correctly. It seems like its just all one long word, but you know there are spaces. Looking further into the issue you find that non-breaking spaces are everywhere. How do you fix it?

OpenResty the Prebuilt Reverse Proxy

An overview of the scriptable, open source, nginx-based reverse proxy -- OpenResty.

Sublime Text 2 Tweaks

Sublime Text 2 configuration for vim users.

Batch Convert CR2 to JPG

How to use imagemagick to bulk-convert Cannon Raw Format to a jpeg or png.

faster rails boot ruby 1.9.3 + debugger

read/write filesystem on rooted android for an ad-free android experience

pip install pymongo with xcode 4

Firefox Plugin - Watching for an Application Exit Event

Capture the Firefox close event in a Firefox Plugin.