x-ufo

Earlier this year I mislaid the ‘5 degrees of Freedom’ accel/gyro unit(not that difficult as it’s literally stampsized) but during cleaning yesterday, I came across a brown envelope… I’ve also aquired a set of 5 Parallax Propeller Protoyping boards, which should help speed development along as I won’t have to make PCBs or trust the connections on a experimenter board.

Got the battery and a charger today.

The battery is a Hyperion 3S 20-30C 800mAh, and when I put it on the scales I got a nice surprise. It only weighed 68grams – 70 with the connector from the old battery – so I’m shaving 13 grams off of the total weight of the X-UFO. That, and I’m doubling the power… That translates into FLIGHT TIME!

I got the battery and charger from Elefun.no, a Norwegian shop, but most well-stocked R/C-hobby stores, particularly those catering to ‘electric-flight’ enthusiasts, have them in stock.

Got a few components in today.

That was the good news…
The not so good news is that the distributor screwed up and sent me 0603-size SMT 100KOhm resistors, when I had ordered 0805-size.

The difference?
0805 is a pain to work with, and the 0603 is even smaller…

I’ll still try to use them, though(so that I can test the ADC setup, and get some data out of the Gyro and stuff), but I’ll also order a new set. Besides, I still need to order a few other components, like MOSFETs, Xtals, possibly a couple of EEPROMs, and I really should try to find a 3.3V compatible digital compass circuit.

Got the gyro/accelerometer today.As I already have a few Propeller chips(SIP40 modules, but OK for testing), all I need now is a few resistors and capacitors.
They are on order from a local supplier as Sparkfun doesn’t seem to sell 0805-size SMT components.(They’re a pain to solder but it’s necessary to shorten signal paths. The recommendation is 0603-size components, but as I’m not that much of an masochist…)

Until they arrive, I’ll just occupy my time doodling PCBs…