Nothing

So I haven't really done anything the past few days. I said I'd work with the Arduino, but I've been too much of a slacker for that. I did weigh all the parts I did have, which were well under 200 grams, which is good since I have to be under 800. I still have to weigh the motors and speed controllers which will be the heaviest things.

I did do an interview to go to a new school, though, and it's looking good. I'll actually learn something in this school which will be cool. Nothing else, really, but I just wanted to inform my future self that I haven't died yet.

AeroQuad Stuff

So today, while I was taking a nap, a package arrived with the stuff I ordered from AeroQuad for my quadrocopter. I took a bunch of pictures of all the stuff and I'll explain it. I couldn't experiment with it today because it's late and I haven't finished studying for my Spanish test tomorrow. I plan on weighing everything, working on the Arduno, and balancing the propellers later on this week.

So in the picture above, you can see the view of everything that came. Everything is sealed in its original packaging except the accelerometer, gyroscope, and Ardunio. The second picture (to the right), is just the receipt showing everything that was delivered.

The thing I'm most excited about is the Arduino. This will basically be the brain of the quadrocopter, evaluating everything the transmitter sends and determining outputs for each motor. It came in a nice little box with a bunch of stickers and a little booklet that I probably won't read. The Arduino is probably the coolest item I'll ever see with "Made in Italy" written on it.

So this is the cool box the Arduino came in. It's blue... with words on it.

Here's the box opened. The Arduino is in the center, the information booklet is on the left, and most importantly, the stickers are on the right.

This is the Arduino up close. It's sideways. I'm not sure if it being sideways will be a major problem when putting together my quadrotor; let's hope not.

The next most important thing that came was the shield, to the left. It's not very clear because it's in a bag, but basically, you just put it on top of the Arduino. It's specifically designed both for the quadrocopter and the Arduino so you can easily solder the sensors and other things where they belong.

Another unclear picture. These are the stackable female headers. They simply connect the AeroQuad shield to the Arduino.

These are the straight breakout pins. You can break them apart to have any number connected. You solder them to the sensors and to the shield to easily connect the two together.

These are also very important. The gyroscope (top) measures rotational movement on all three planes. This is necessary so the Arduino can tell how much the quadrotor is tilted and adjust for that. The accelerometer (bottom) measures linear movement on all three planes. It can sense the acceleration of the quadrocopter so it can stay in the same general area in the air. Both give six degrees of freedom and are necessary for stable flight.

This is a servo extension cable. I got seven of them. What they do is connect the radio receiver channels, which are connected to the antenna, to the Arduino. Now the Arduino can evaluate the signals transmitted to the quadrocopter.

The last things that came were the propellers. I ordered four extras, just because according to everyone who's worked on these before, the propellers will be the first things to break. Two of the propellers are normal and two are "pusher" propellers, which are basically reversed and meant to be rotated in the other direction. They simply cancel each other out so the quadrocopter doesn't rotate. I also read that propellers are rarely ever balanced when they arrive, so I need to fix that for each one. If a propeller is unbalanced, it stresses one side of the motor more making it less efficient and decreasing its life. You can imagine what a one-bladed propeller would do to a motor. It's the same thing, but with a reduced effect.

So... that's everything. I plan on keeping updates on this project so you can follow it. Thank you for reading my blog... I just noticed how funny 'blog' sounds. I wonder who made that word up. Anyway, I have to get ready for bed and study for Spanish.

Code Camp

Today, I did something cool. I went to Charlotte Code Camp. It was pretty amazing. If it seems like I'm typing in a monotone... tone, it's because I'm tired. Code Camp really was awesome. We (my father and I) didn't really 'formally' sign up, because I went to the site too late, but we went anyway because a fraction of the people expected don't show up to events like these.

When we arrived, we got a schedule and several pieces of paper with the sponsors on them, which was completely interesting and definitely not a waste of ink and paper. So, I chose an event to go to, on XNA particle systems, which is basically programming things like snow, clouds of dust, and fire. I want to look into XNA because I'm really looking into game/app development as at least a hobby. It wasn't really as much of a tutorial as I would have hoped, but it gave me ideas about what I could do in the future. I also won a free textbook on C++ or C# or something like that, which I'm definitely reading later. At the same time, my dad was in a class on making Windows Phone 7 apps, which I want to look into as well. He got another textbook from that on how to make Windows Phone 7 apps, to be redundant.

Afterwards, we both went to a lecture on Netduino, a microcontroller like Arduino, but with more memory and arguably much better for the same price. The guy who gave it was pretty cool. He made a water jet by his pool powered by the Netduino. He could tap places on the pool from his phone for the water jet to squirt. He showed us a basic program made to blink an LED on and off, which I just learned how to do with the Arduino last Sunday. That code was shorter than the code for the Netduino, although they were both simple.

When that lecture was over, we went to lunch. They gave it to us for free. I'm sure you're interested in what I had. I had some macaroni and cheese, if I remember. I also had garlic bread and salad. They tasted like garlic bread and salad, respectively. They provided free soda, chips, and junk food. I got lots of each. If you read that paragraph, I can tell you two things: first, you are at least semi-literate, and, second, you probably have no life, like me, which is perfectly legitimate to some people, including, but not limited to, me.

After lunch, I went to a lab. It was about a tool called Microsoft LightSwitch. I made an application that basically took information about authors in a form-like way. It allowed you to pair them up with one or more books. Although it's nothing I would use normally, it was still interesting to learn and may serve a purpose some other time.

The last thing I went to was a lecture and demo on mobile sites. I learned several interesting things from that. First, Windows Phone 7 doesn't support touch in its browser, so you can't click on things with your finger normally. That eliminates any chance that I'm going to get one. I also learned that websites with mobile versions get bumped up in a Google or Bing search, which is cool because it makes more people want to create mobile sites. That was cool, and I just want any website developers (maybe me in the future) to know that they need to make more mobile sites, because barely any normal sites are user-friendly.

There was another section, but none of the classes during it interested me, so I sat in the car reading video game stuff on my phone and looking through the textbooks we got. I went back in, and they had a raffle for stuff. The first person to win got an Xbox with a Kinect, but there were two envelopes with keys to $2000 windows software he could have also chosen, but didn't. I can't say I would do differently, though, because I don't know enough about the software to be trusted with it. Overall, it was awesome, and I'm hoping to go next year.

Ow... my head...

Oh, sorry. I was just reading through my most recent posts. Yeah, those ones from like, a year ago. Yep, I've started again, and I'm not going to say for good, because I've said that before, and it didn't happen. So I guess I should explain those other posts... Well, what happened was... I thought I was cool and my social life was important, but now, I've realized that talking to myself over the internet is far more productive than making real friends. So if you're reading this, you're probably me... or someone I've asked to read it. But seriously, I want to have something to suck up my time, and this seems right. So I'm going to go over what I plan on doing on this blog and what has happened to me over the relatively short period of time since I've stopped blogging.

My decision to blog was a sudden, random decision about ten or fifteen minutes before I finished writing this sentence. In order to tell you how this decision came around, I have to explain the past year. So, middle school was awesome. I had lots of friends, and it was pretty fun. During the summer, my friends and I got together a lot and hung out. However, afterwards, we went to separate schools. Most of my friends went to one school, East-Meck, and I went to Rocky River. The system had to through me in there so the test scores wouldn't be as bad as they would otherwise. It's really a longer story than that, but I couldn't find anyone I could relate to in that school, and to be honest, I have approximately 0 friends that are like the ones I had in middle school that go with me to high school. I started to hate it, and I found this cool FIRST robotics team called Yeti which I joined. We were a rookie team and we went to nationals. It was pretty awesome. I'm friends with everyone on the team and they're pretty great; far better than any friends I have at my school. So after we went to nationals (and got 25th out of 88 in our division), we were trying to decide what to do, and one of the boys kind of jokingly said "We should build a quadrocopter!". I'd seen them before on YouTube, and they seemed pretty cool, so I looked at more videos. The more I watched, the more I got obsessed (this was all last week, if you want to know). So anyway, I eventually got serious about it even though it kind of started as a joke. I found a cool site with tutorials for every step of building one, and after a few days of researching, I ordered all the parts. They haven't arrived yet, and they may while my dad is out of town next week. So, today, he said he wanted me to take pictures as I received and began building everything and post them on here. That was about an hour or so before I finished writing this sentence, so I thought maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to blog again, so here I am.

I really hope to do a lot on here. I'll rant about things and maybe put up tutorials on cool and interesting things. I will talk about my life and stuff... and I really suck at coming up with plans, so if you're interested, just stay tuned and read. So, bye!

Parkour iz 4 Ninjaz

I'd say the biggest thing about me that has changed since I stopped blogging is my interest in sports. I dislike certain most sports less, but I think most of them are overrated; especially football. Football is a variation of CAPTURE THE FLAG, but not the best. The best kind of capture the flag is the kind where you play with paintball guns. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, I wanted to talk about parkour and freerunning since I've been obsessed with them lately. Most people haven't heard of parkour before and slightly more have heard of freerunning, but still, not many. Those who know of both don't really know the difference. Parkour is French for simply 'the art of movement'. It was always there, but it was given its name and popularity by David Belle. Parkour and freerunning are types of urban gymnastics. If you see a grown man at a playground with no children, they're probably training since that's the best place. I would say the difference between the two is that parkour is the efficiency of movement and freerunning is the freedom of it. In parkour, you're normally trying to get from one point to another in a city as fast and in as straight a line as possible. This means climbing buildings, jumping from one to another, vaulting fences and all the other stuff our obese police officers hate. Freerunning uses most of the same moves, but you're not really trying to get anyware and it looks cooler because you do more flips. You don't really need flips in parkour, they're just to look better. I always liked challenging others to catch me, especially last year when me and ten others would play a game called infection, which I think is the same thing as manhunt. One person would start out as the infected and tag others. Everytime you get tagged, you're infected and it goes on until everyone is. We played it during HAC (our 'recess' at my school). You would usually start out hiding and once the infected found you, you'd run from them, jumping border fences and climbing baseball ones (Actually, only I climbed the baseball fence because I'm a ninja.). This year, I heard about parkour (I didn't even know it existed as a sport before then.). Someone asked my dad what sports I liked and he said parkour. I asked "What's parkour?" and he told me parkour was urban gymnastics. I searched it on the computer like I always do with new topics and learned the PK roll and tons of different vaults and wall runs and stuff like that. I might even end up putting some tutorials on here. The thing I hate about parkour is how it's not accepted unless you're in a gymnastics class (I wish I was in one.) or on your own property. My favorite place to practice is at schools because they always have those parallel railings that you can balance across and practice precision jumps on and do almost any kind of vault over. I also like playgrounds, but there're so many adults watching. At least every single kid wants to play tag and can never catch you. Adults... don't... understand... "Why don't you play any sports, son?" "I do, I'm a traceur." "What the hell is that, son?" "An urban gymnast." "Go play football you anti-social ************* *****-***". I don't actually thing adults would act like that, but they can still be annoying when you don't use society's accepted extracurricular activities. Thank you for reading.

Music

I used to dislike most music, but that's because I didn't listen to any of the music that I do listen to now. I don't like most music with any kind of vocals (Except A Cappella (here); A Capella is awesome.) I like some music with vocals though. I like it when the vocals make sense and I actually care about them. That rules out most love songs because they're either about being rejected or not liking the person you're in a relationship with and I don't care about either. I hate the songs where people scream because first of all it sounds bad, and second of all you can't understand a thing they're saying. I don't normally like rap because those songs are usually about sex, money, murder or some other thing that you shouldn't be singing about. Other times, they just put words that rhyme together that make no sense at all. I'm okay otherwise. The kind of music I do like is techno and trance music. My two favorite are this and this. I know a lot of people who hate techno, but I think that's because they've never actually listened to what I think of as real techno. Real techno for me is melodic, something that's not distracting if you're doing work, something that you can listen to over and over and not get tired of, something relaxing or exciting depending on the mood you're in and has several other qualities. Songs with vocals usually don't have those. Sometimes I'm listening to song's piano intro, and I'm thinking 'This is an awesome song!' and then the vocals have to come in and ruin the whole thing. But the real reason I brought all this up is because I wanted to tell anyone who's reading this that I made a song. It's simple, and it's my first. Sometimes, I'll think of a melody in my mind and hum it so I don't forget. When I get to the keyboard (electric piano, not the thing connected to your computer) and learn to play it on that. I finally found out how to put these onto the computer using audacity and that's what I did. The problem with coming up with these melodies is I always come up with them at the wrong times. I'll think of one in the middle of class or in the car on a road trip, never right by a piano. Anyway, this is the song I made. It could have been better, but that's how it turned out in the end.

I've Started Again!

Yes! The title tells you. I'm going to start blogging again. I have no idea how long it's been since my last real post, but this is my next. In such a long amount of time, my interests have changed. I still have a lot of the same though. I don't mess around with Legos a lot anymore; maybe occasionally, but not often. I've stopped playing RuneScape and am happy about it. Instead of using all these cheap programs like Scratch and Genesis3D to make video games, I'm learning to program using the programming language Python (www.python.org). I've decided I want to be a video game designer or have some other programming job when I get older. I want to go to MIT even though that's setting my hopes really, really high. I finally started going to public school which is the main reason I stopped blogging. I used to blog as a homeschool assignment every day, now I want to do it as an activity. As a physical, outdoor activity, I've decided on parkour and freerunning which are both types of urban gymnastics. The only problem with them is the fact that they're not accepted widely like boring (to me) sports such as football. I want to get good grades in school so I can end up with a good job. The only bad grade I got in school was last year; I got a B in language arts. Otherwise, I'm doing good. I usually don't get lower than a 97% in any classes. The cool thing about school is you have friends you can see every day which is why I was really bored in my previous posts. No friends in homeschool... at least no face-to-face ones. I never know how to end these things... I'll just end how I used to: The End.