Blog

This article walks through building and programming of a VESC V6 Brushless Motor Controller with Field Oriented Control.

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.

This is a build guide and review for the new Tevo Tarantual Pro 3D printer.

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!

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.

As part of my research work at Stanford, I have been training Object Detection Deep Neural Networks. Training these networks is extremely compute intensive, and while we have a variety of powerful compute options at Stanford, I was looking for a faster way to train these networks. This article is a detailed guide to training the popular RetinaNet object detection network on TPU.

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.

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

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.

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"

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.

A quick introduction to the NuttX RTOS and programming for Px4 development.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I bought a bunch of FPV goggles and tried them out so you don't have to. This article is a review and comparison of all these goggles.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

A quick tutorial on setting up ProRes editing in Premier.

This is a guide to the Xiaomi Yi action camera.

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).

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.

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

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.

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

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.

How to flash Ubuntu Trusty 14.04 to the Beaglebone Black.

A short primer on Java reversing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I recently received a Soldering Station, mine is labeled Huayu 898D+, but they sent the 220v version instead of the 110v part I need for our standard power here in the US. This post covers the (possibly unsafe, don't try this at home!) conversion to 110v.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I've setup my 9x RC Radio with OpenTX for in-flight-adjustments, allowing me to tune my PIDs while flying.

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.

This is a quick tip on disassembling AVR binaries via radare2

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

This guide details how to build the open source android operating system on Ubuntu 14.04 and configure the required packages.

A quick guide on APK decompilation via apktool.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

A quick guide on setting up AngularJS and Rails.

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?

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

Sublime Text 2 configuration for vim users.

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

Capture the Firefox close event in a Firefox Plugin.

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