I decided to be slack and buy the pre-soldered kit, I can solder and it’s not like it was anything hard like surface mount. Big NOTE when they say pre-soldered they don’t mean the entire kit has be soldered you still have to solder 24 bullet connectors and the power distribution board, and for some reason they give you the magnetometer attached by cable not soldered directly to a header on a board like they recommend.

So what I purchased from Jdrones

• ArduCopter Quad v1.1 KIT, KIT, Pre-Soldered, Tested + Software
• Upgraded with the 880kv motors 30amp esc and larger props.
• Also wanted to be able to do low altitude hover so I brought a sonar
• http://store.jdrones.com/product_p/cbl3psnr01.htm (cable)
• http://store.jdrones.com/product_p/mb1200.htm (sonar)
• http://store.jdrones.com/product_p/mntmx12pc01.htm (mount)
• What I forgot to buy is some headers: http://store.jdrones.com/product_p/conhead20angle.htm and http://store.jdrones.com/product_p/conhead20str.htm

Ok so this isn’t enough to make it fly and yes you’ve just spent nearly a AU$1000 you’ll also need to get a Battery, and a radio. For that I tried the hobbyking.com shop. Note: if it’s not in stock in the Australian warehouse delivery times seem a bit slow.Also LiPo battery’s can not be shipped by air, make sure you buy in Australia for those.

battery: ZIPPY Flightmax 2650mAh 3S1P 40C also need some connectors XT60 Battery charger I’m using a cheap only does 2S and 3S batteries get it from jaycar Lipo balanced charger

Lastly is the radio the most expensive single item after the kit. I’m trying to get my hand on this but apparently the queue is long and the might take months. why so popular you ask well it cost like $60. and something with that many channels cost normally around $200+ so If nothing ships soon I’m looking at buying one of these Futaba 7c and probably from the more local hobby store dune planes

What you need to know about the TX RX radio is basically get 2.4 GHz otherwise the local model aircraft club will not let you fly near them. and you need at least 6 channels and any more than 8 channels is pointless

The diydrone has a very smart and easily programmable flight controller if you want cheap and no as intelligent have a look at kkmulticopter

Start by enabling the Tim S repo

To install the repo first install the public key (yes all RPM’s will now be signed)
rpm --import ftp://timburgess.net/RPM-GPG-KEY-TimB.txt

Then install the release RPM (by default the ‘timb’ and ‘timb-testing’ repo’s will be disabled)

wget ftp://timburgess.net/repo/clearos/5.2/os/timb-release-1-0.noarch.rpm
rpm -Kv timb-release-1-0.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh timb-release-1-0.noarch.rpm

ref http://www.clearfoundation.com/docs/howtos/adding_tim_s_repo

yum --enablerepo=timb install kmod-atl1e

ref http://www.clearfoundation.com/component/option,com_kunena/Itemid,232/catid,28/func,view/id,24438/limit,10/limitstart,50/

last you need to edit the /etc/modprobe.conf
it need to contain an alias for every network card in my case I have a TP-link installed as well so

alias eth0 r8169
alias eth1 atl1e

if you fail to get this to work ifconfig -a will have a odd tmp interface.

The simple way is just lunch vlc remote it’s sitting on most university computers and select channel and go.

Otherwise just open  vlc select open network media stream and copy address from below

ABC news24  udp://@239.240.240.1:1234

also a good excuse to upload a picture of Sophia Ada our new baby human

Ubuntu compatibility is plug in wait and print work out the box. (10.04)

$99 from office works.

Only fault does not come with a USB cable !

Got the SDK and sample code up and running on the mac pro, next thing to do is find some maths problem to do on it which will be faster than on a CPU / Grid. well at least that it will be faster given a better GPU the NVIDIA GT 120 isn’t that fast considering there is 2 Xenon quad core chips 2.4ghz. on the mac then there at 6 macs connected to the Xgrid. so it will be a bit hard to do a direct comparison.

Also had a informal meeting with the lab manager from physics we discussed how that for ever increasing amount of remote courses at the university how he plans to do physics labs for the astronomy course next year.

Ended up sending him to have a look at the UTS remote labs http://remotelabs.eng.uts.edu.au/ and told him to keep us posted since it’s all of interest.

So any ideas how to show that CUDA and GPU computing is useful ? or how to conduct an astronomy lab when your students are in Queensland ?

See the following link for information on how to fix if you have similar issues

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/360936

now to go check all the other wordpress sites.

If this site is redirecting you to other sites please comment below.

Solution install nscd name server cache daemon

sudo apt-get install nscd

apt://ncsd

by the way this was found out by putting a complaint into the commonwealth bank which the complaint was swiftly replied to with generic flush your DNS for windows instructions and further instructions saying that AVG link scanner also is known to slow down Netbank. but once I dismissed these solutions as not solving the problem they then actually asked real questions got me to try and different dns server.  I also got plenty of phone calls check that my problem has been resolved or that at least someone is attempting to fix it so there ads must be right..

In the long run Commonwealth bank need to fix there DNS so that there sub-domain address is faster to look up.

In the short term my problem is fixed if it’s only a speed increase when I log into Netbank for the 2nd time, since the cache seems to clear on each restart.

README can be found at https://svn.ci.uchicago.edu/svn/if-media/AGVCRToMPEG2/README

Dependencies from apt repos:

• Scons
• Subversion
• Build-essentials
• libgsm
• libsamplerate
• libz

sudo apt-get install scons subversion build-essential libgsm1-dev libsamplerate-dev libz-dev

Download the code form the svn repository

svn co https://svn.ci.uchicago.edu/svn/if-media/AGVCRToMPEG2

We have to use the exact version of ffmpeg that he used in development since he has used superseeded functions from the ffmpeg libiary

svn co svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg -r 5652

Configure and Make ffmpeg (don’t install unless you want to)

cd ffmpeg

./configure

make

Next we have to edit the scons file in cd ~/AGVCRToMPEG2 , it is meant to take the command argument of where you complied the version of ffmpeg but it seems to use old and outdated scons code so we hard code the location in.

Using your favourite editor e.g vim SConstruct

On line 23:

ffmpeg_path = env['ffmpeg_path']
#ffmpeg_path= /home/jack/D/project/ffmpeg

change to

#ffmpeg_path = env['ffmpeg_path']
ffmpeg_path= ‘/home/carma/ffmpeg’

replace carma with your username

We can now attempt to compile the code with the the command scons. but your most likely to get errors due to poor C++ coding most are just related to messing #includes

The following files will need to be edited:

AGVCRToMPEG2.cpp
VPMedia/video/h261/VPMH261ASEncoder.cpp
VPMedia/video/h261/VPMH261Encoder-mash.cpp
VPMedia/video/VPMVideoBufferSink.cpp
VPMedia/video/VPMVideoAssembler.cpp
AudioMixer.cpp
VPMSSRCManager.cpp

To make things easier attached is the output of svn diff AGVCRTOMPEG2_904update.patch Note gunzip because of wordpress security doesn’t allow patch files.

gunzip AGVCRTOMPEG2_904update.patch.gz

now patch

patch -p0 < AGVCRTOMPEG2_904update.patch

Compile attempt 2

scons

Readme contains many examples and hopefully you now have a working system.

Linux suitable for every event

Today Kymberly and I had our engagement party. If you haven’t kept pace and I don’t blame you since I haven’t updated the blog. But yes, we are engaged. I asked Kym to marry me on the 16th of June, and she said yes. Romantic stories are for another blog far far away.

Anyway I really wanted to share our lovely Engagement Cake… If you know why you have an engagement cake be sure to tell me. But it kept the future mother in-law happy.