Freesteel Blog » 2015 » March

Monday, March 23rd, 2015 at 6:08 pm - - Whipping

I’m doing a lot of politics stuff running up to the general election, but I don’t feel like blogging about it much.

Actually, I’m not doing that much. What’s happening is that all the work I did ten years ago is finally being put into use today by other people, resulting in an event such as this fine rant from the LibDem MP in Bristol West:

To claim, as the website Public Whip does, that I ‘voted very strongly for selling England’s state owned forests’ is misleading in the extreme. I have never voted in favour of selling forest land – I voted against two poorly worded and hyperbolic motions submitted by the Labour Party.

I never believed I’d see the day where MPs would have to answer for the things they voted for in Parliament. Anyway, there’s that and electionleaflets.org and Francis’s Candidate CVs project gathering steam. What a difference five years of internet technology advancement and greater generational awareness can make.

Meanwhile, I was in Bristol for a few days helping a friend with some DIY, because I want to put this kind of laminate floor down in our kitchen on top of some real insulation:
aaflooring

Then I did some painting before getting relieved of my duties for spreading paint all up the paint brush handle.
aaskirts

I spent the night on the Blorenge, then flew at lunch time completely alone for two hours until I suddenly got dumped down in the bottom landing field in Abergaveny. Nobody took any notice of my death spiral down to the ground; just kept walking their dogs. I am still working hard to process the data into something meaningful — if this is possible.
hgbloreng

An invite went out for a surf on the Dee Bore on Saturday morning. I thought it might be special, being the day after a partial solar eclipse, but it was a damp squib and most of us lost the wave within a few hundred metres.
deebore

On Sunday I tried to fly on The Gyrne, but there was no wind and few thermals, so I went off on a long cycle round Lake Vyrnwy with my friend.
aacrinkly
The land-scape round these parts is ever so crinkly.

Tuesday, March 17th, 2015 at 8:39 am - - Hang-glide

Here I am at a climbing wall in Bristol, having balked at the price and instead sat in the cafe. They ought to have a discount rate for people don’t actually like climbing. Here’s what I enjoy instead. (I am so predictable):

pontwales

Brrr, it was cold in grimmest South Wales on a grim Saturday when all the colours are grey and the light makes everything flat. I enjoyed a sublime hour long flight above Pontlottyn, even though I didn’t go anywhere except soar up and down the ridge alone and then top land in a howling gale.

My box of tricks is in the 3D printed purple box on my left next to the airspeed indicator. I’ve not had the chance to do anything with the data except plot it and go: “that’s pretty noisy” at the accelerometer data. I have plans to extract consistent correlations, barometer vs altitude vs temperature, bar position vs wind speed, roll angle vs turning rate registered on the compass, and whether I keep diving out of turns because I don’t have enough speed and control.

Unlike my so far doomed attempts at manipulating house and fridge temperature data, this flight dynamical system is memory-free. The same temperature, pressure, windspeed, and wing angle at any time of the flight should result in exactly the same response. Deformations of the wing are brief and temporary. This is not the case for the fridge where every cycle begins with a different temperature distribution within the dense cabbagy foodstuffs and chemical pumping machinery.

Subject to instrumental noise and turbulence, all the data should be with me, and I can only hope this isn’t going to end up as just another one of my expensive failed software projects that looked plausible when I began, but then crash landed in the trees.

Wednesday, March 11th, 2015 at 3:35 pm - - Hang-glide

In spite of being up to lots of things, I’ve not been very interested in blogging of late.

I got my first flight of the year — a 3 minute top-to-bottom that began with a nil-wind terror swoop on take-off, followed by my almost forgetting to unzip the harness on landing due to being distracted by the sight of ducks paddling around in one corner of the water-logged field.

landingshadow

Here’s the data stream from the landing.
landingdata
Vertical lines at 5 second intervals. Yellow for barometer (air pressure rises as I descend), red for airspeed, cyan for GPS ground speed (seeming to correspond), white accelerometer pitch measurement, showing the pathetic flare coming into landing when all the speed drops off. The previous hump may correspond to the final approach turn (you have to push out to tighten the turn to a turning circle of about 35metres).

takeoffdata
Here’s the take-off sequence, with a slight push-out which was not held long enough, so I dropped very fast. The yellow for the barometer briefly goes below the starting value showing that at one time I got a bit of lift and could have been almost half a metre above take-off.

All in all, quite disappointing, but I’m glad to have some data to work with from my electronics device. I’m going to really appreciate the next flight when I stay up for a bit.

hgelectronics
Oh yeah, here’s a close-up of the one corner of my dog’s breakfast electronics project.

boxprinting
Luckily, 3D printers can print anything — including the abominable box I’ve “designed” in OpenSCAD to cram that electronics stuff into.

machtooldoes
Meanwhile, all this will probably be shelved due to this widget showing up in the hack-space this lunchtime. More later.