User Blogs

Some little while ago, I picked up an e-Flite Apprentice, a fairly common foam "trainer" model airplane which is normally sold "ready to fly" with everything but the battery and charger. It was part of a lot of stuff that I picked up for ten dollars, and came without the radio. First I repaired it and mounted a HobbyKing HK-T6A v2 radio, but I quickly decided that it should be more than just a plane.

When I assembled my quadcopter, I always intended it to become a drone, that is to say, with autonomous features. The typical use case for the hobbyist is intelligent failsafe, specifically return-to-home or "RTH" capability. As I've assembled the parts to accomplish this, it's made me consider how to achieve the same thing for my plane.

Well, I finally built me a drone so's I could fit in with all the cool kids. What follows is a short description of my experience with helpful links for someone else who would like to build a substantially similar quad. I built basically the cheapest quadcopter you could use for anything more than just crashing into stuff, a SK450 whose parts were primarily sourced from eBay — and usually with the very cheapest parts.

I'm a big fan of the Fallout franchise, so when I discovered Fallout Shelter, I was happy to see a new member of the family. It's actually a pretty engaging little game, but it has some ugly flaws that I find frustrating, so I'm going to complain about them.

I wanted to keep some programs running, which is to say restart them if they crashed, but I also wanted them to be able to exit normally. The platform is Linux, the problem is compiz, the solution is a very small shell script. Surely the internets will let me know if there is something grossly wrong with it. This script is not meant for long-running daemons, there are plenty of tools for that already.