User Blogs

Assassins Creed is a really nifty psuedohistorical series of parcourt assassination games, and Assassins Creed: Unity is one of the recent entries in the series — which was included in a Humble Bundle of most of the titles. This post is not a news flash. It is a summary I'm writing because I don't want to have to track this information down again, distilled from a couple of pages I found googling.

Today I balanced the Dead Cat drone's motors with a zip tie and a hot glue gun. Wow, this is EASY. I got the idea by searching Youtube for motor balancing videos. For those too lazy to watch a video on the subject, you don't need one. Here's the steps to go through to balance your motors.

Today I used Kapton (okay, Koptan) tape for one of its common purposes for the first time, to stop insulation melting and disappearing while I was tinning leads. I got the leads out of an old parallel cable, and they probably weren't meant to be soldered at all. Old computer cables are bar none the cheapest source of highly multi-colored, small-gauge finely-stranded wire I know of. If you pick them up from thrift store warehouses or flea markets you can get them for less than a dollar, and get yourself a meter or more of 20+ different colors of wire.

About this time last year, I built myself a SK450 quadcopter to cheaply familiarize myself with the hobby and gain a fun new toy. That project came off very well, and I was pleased with the results for the money spent. This time, I'm upgrading that copter into a "dead cat" configuration, using some new parts and some old ones — but mostly new.

When I was offered a $300 1998 A8 Quattro parts car (for my 1997) I leapt at the chance. By the time I got it home, though, I thought better of my plan to swap the electrical harness from that car to my car, and decided that I would swap the transmission from the old car into the "parts" car because it was in such better shape. But this presented a problem — how do I pull the engine and transmission out of one car, and put it into the next, given my lack of a perfectly flat and level place to work? The answer as I see it is to build an A-Frame or a gantry.