As some of you know, the first weekend in October was a big deal for me,
because it was
NCR's
Oktoberfest launch event.
My son and I spent the weekend camped out on the prairie
with Keith Packard and many of our other friends. Keith successfully went
from nothing to a "level 2" high power certification, which was pretty cool.
I wasn't quite so lucky.
On Saturday morning, I flew my custom-designed rocket YikStik for a "level 3"
certification attempt. The name comes from the word my wife uses to describe
lipstick. The rocket was built from a mixture of custom and
Giant Leap
parts, including 98mm Dyna Wind airframe, a 98-75mm tail cone retainer, and
a Pinnacle nose cone. All the centering rings were cut on my 3-axis CNC
milling machine, and the fins were custom 7-layer composite layups using
plywood, carbon fiber, fiberglass, and epoxy... all vacuum bagged using a
kitchen food saver appliance. Painted red, gold, and black, with a custom
8 foot main parachute sewn by my wife Karen from the
Team Vatsaas
design in red and black rip-stop nylon.
The motor selected was an
Aerotech
M1297W reload. This is a 75mm diameter motor 66.5cm in length with 2722 grams
of propellant yielding 5417 Newton-seconds of total impulse. It was also on
sale earlier this year for cert attempts.
My simulations
said YikStik should have flown to about 14,800 feet above ground level at the
NCR north site on this motor.
The launch went perfectly, and the rocket was stunningly beautiful under boost.
It disappeared into some high clouds, but we continued to have strong signals
from the two tracking transmitters installed in the payload bay behind the
nose cone. About the anticipated time after launch, we saw a rocket descending
under chute in the distance, and headed in that direction. A few minutes
later, we abruptly lost both tracking signals, and that's when things took a
turn for the weird.
In hindsight, I think we suffered an apogee deployment of the main chute, and
the rocket we saw descending was someone else's. YikStik
was designed to deploy a streamer at apogee, then descend fairly quickly
to about 1500 feet above ground where a second set of ejection charges would
fire to separate the nose cone on a 3 foot drogue parachute that would pull a
deployment bag containing the main chute out of the airframe and then pull
the bag off the chute. The nose cone, payload bay with the tracking
transmitters, and deployment bag would then descend under the drogue chute and
the remainder of the rocket would descend under the big chute. In the world
of deployment bags, this is called a 'free bag' configuration. With deployment
at 1500 feet, the two bits should have landed within sight of each other. But
that didn't happen.
It wasn't until late Sunday afternoon, after we had to leave to get Keith to
the airport, that some friends finally located the nose cone assembly about
3.5 miles down range from the launch site, over a couple rises and past an
area of rough terrain. By then it was cold, windy, and rainy, and so I really
appreciated the effort they put in locating the nose, and wasn't too surprised
that they didn't immediately see the rest. Since the bulk of the rocket under
the main should have had a slightly higher descent rate than the nose cone,
I expected to find the rest of the rocket somewhere near a line between the
launch rail and where the nose cone was discovered. So last Wednesday I
spent about 5.5 hours walking around the area searching... but no luck.
Since then, several other people have been out looking for my rocket,
including two friends who flew over the area today in a light plane looking
down into all the washes. Still nothing.
I posted some signs in the area with a photo of the rocket and my contact info,
I hope someone calls eventually. In the meantime, the bulk of YikStik remains
missing, and of course I did not achieve a successful level 3 certification.
Lessons learned for next time are that tethering the deployment bag to the
main chute instead of flying in a "free bag" configuration might have been a
better choice, and it's kind of silly having two tracking transmitters in one
of the two pieces of your rocket and none in the other...
Ray LaPanse took some stunning photos of the launch. He will likely post
better versions with color correction and so forth at some point, but in the
meantime, I've put a few up on my
Garbee Rockets
web site. She sure was a beauty!
I decided to get an electic bike when my car died. Couldn't
quite stomach buying a new gasoline vehicle at this point in time, didn't
really feel like another used car, and the available electic cars are still
too new/expensive/hard to find. While there are some neat NEVs that are not
too expensive, they're too limited to be worth my money, and electic bikes
fit into the same general niche. (So do electic scooters, but I didn't want
to spend that much money on an experiment..)
My first try was a disaster. I was thinking that a large cargo capacity
would be a good thing, so I gravitated toward trikes. However, the one I
tried turned out to be a lemon in several ways, and suffered a catastropic
and dangerous controller burnout. So I learned that this electic bike
industry is pretty rough and ready with a lot of junk to avoid. I also
learned that I don't enjoy riding trikes.
The second try was a R Martin LX1, which my dad
had researched. I got it yesterday, and have ridden it some now, and I
agree that it's a good one.
As a bike, it's well built, has a good back disc brake and decent front
brake (will be better once I bring it to a bike shop to adjust it better),
has a good derailer, and rides well. I'm no expert but it seems about as
good as the bike I used to commute with, though the frame is a bit heavier.
(IIRC, it was also at least $200 cheaper than that bike!)
On the electic side, it has a relatively small and light lithium ion
battery; the motor is mounted in the hub. It's strong enough to go up hills
on its own if you really want it to, but you will end up pedaling to
assist, which is good.
I'm undecided whether the six gears are enough ... Seems like I might want a
faster gear, to be able to assist the motor more at high speed. I haven't
wanted a lower gear yet, but I've not tried to do any hills without the
motor's help.
The electic controls are ok, but not perfect. I worry about accidentially
twisting the throttle, although it has to be turned quite far to engage the
motor.
Ideally, the pedal assist would turn the motor on exactly when you pedal,
and porportionally to how hard. Instead, there'a a lag, and doesn't care
how hard you pedal. This can present problems coming up to an intersection
or other hazard, where pedal assist kicking in can unexpectedly be more
speed than is needed. Seems a waste to have to brake to cut the assist off.
The motor is audible when accellerating, and especially complains when
trying to get me up a hill on its own. At speed, or if given a human power
assist, it's quieter than the chain, if not silent.
So there's room for improvement (and this would be a fun thing to do some
hacking on to improve its response), but it's still a lot of fun. I'd
forgotten how much I enjoy riding a bike and getting a nice workout. And
it's especially nice to go up a hill pedaling only as hard as you like, to
be able to accellerate quickly without standing on the pedals, and to be
able to "coast" a long, long, way.
I wonder if lintian can be used for flymake.
I would like to have some more on-the-fly checking capability of debian/ dirs.
lintian is a good candidate, but I don't know of a good way to run lintian on a
source directory.
Conceptronic kindly sent me a CH3SNAS for my Debian porting efforts. The
Conceptronic CH3SNAS is reported to be basically the same hardware as the
D-Link DNS-323 but it costs slightly less. There were some reports that
the CH3SNAS uses a 88F5182 chip whereas the D-Link DNS-323 uses a 88F5181
but nobody was able to confirm this for sure. As it turns out, there are
two revisions of the DNS-323. Revision A1 uses a 88F5181 chip along with a
separate SATA chip. Revision B2 on the other hand uses a 88F5182 which
integrates SATA into the SoC itself. The CH3SNAS is equivalent to a D-Link
DNS-323 revision B1. In fact, the mainboard of the CH3SNAS even says
DNS-323 rev B1.
The Linux kernel from mainline only works on the DNS-323 revision A1 at the
moment. Adding support for revision B1 should be trivial since you
basically just need to initialize the SATA chip on the SoC and possibly
adapt some other values. Unfortunately, the DNS-323 uses a very small
serial connector so none of my serial cables work. If I can find someone
who will make a serial cable for me, I'll fix up the kernel.
My 
Gathering
Procmail
This will be the last time I talk about this, but here's my anti-rubbish procmail filter.
It correctly copes with:
Some brief highlights of the last three months of Debian Eee PC development.
Thermal and 
The 
Last Thursday, I was at a conference called 
Not much to say. Just that I am back, now with a mixed English-Spanish blog. I will try to keep entries written in Spanish out of syndicated feed on Planet Debian, but I won’t promise that some entry can slip. It has been long since I had no blog, so it will be a new challenge to try to update it somehow regularly.
Regarding my Debian work, I have to admit that I have become mostly a ‘package and upload’ guy. I don’t have enough spare time to devote to other tasks, so I will mostly try to keep my packages as clean as I can.
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