Drone Registration Is Just FAA Making You Read Their “EULA”

December 29, 2015 by Mike Szczys 94 Comments

Over the last few weeks we’ve waded through the debate of Drone restrictions as the FAA announced, solicited comments, and finally put in place a registration system for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). Having now had a week to look at the regulation, and longer to consider the philosophy behind it, I don’t think this is a bad thing. I think the FAA’s move is an early effort to get people to pay attention to what they’re doing.

The broad picture looks to me like a company trying to get users to actually read an End User Licensing Agreement. I’m going to put the blame for this firmly on Apple. They are the poster children for the unreadable EULA. Every time there is an update, you’re asked to read the document on your smartphone. You scroll down a bit and think it’s not that long, until you discover that it’s actually 47 pages. Nobody reads this, and years of indoctrination have made the click-through of accepting an EULA into a pop-culture reference. In fact, this entire paragraph has been moot. I’d bet 99 out of 103 readers knew the reference before I started the explanation.

So, we have a population of tech adopters who have been cultivated to forego reading any kind of rules that go with a product. Then we have technological advancement and business interests that have brought UAS to the feet of the general public both with low costs, wide availability, and pop-culture appeal. What could possibly go wrong? Let’s jump into that, then cover some of the other issues people are concerned about, like the public availability of personal info on the drone registry.

Continue reading “Drone Registration Is Just FAA Making You Read Their “EULA”” →

Flying Planes With Squirrel Cages

December 29, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 42 Comments

Fixed wing remote control planes are ridiculously overpowered. Whereas normal, manned fixed wing aircraft need to take into account things like density altitude, angle of attack, and weight limits, most RC aircraft can hover. This insane amount of power means there’s a lot of room for experimentation, especially in new and novel power plants. [Samm Sheperd] had an old squirrel cage fan taken from an electric wall heater and figured one man’s trash was an integral part of another man’s hobby and built a plane around this very unusual fan.

The only part of the squirrel cage fan [Samm] reused was the impeller. Every other part of this power plant was either constructed out of foam board, plywood, or in the case of the brushless motor turning the fan, stolen from the ubiquitous box of junk on every modeller’s workbench.

The design of the plane puts the blower fan directly under the wings, blasting the air backwards underneath the empennage. During testing, [Samm] found this blower pulled around 350W from the battery – exactly what it should draw if a properly sized propeller were attached to the motor. The thrust produced isn’t that great — only about 400g of thrust from an airframe that weights 863g. That’s very underpowered for an RC aircraft, but absurdly powerful for any manned flying machine.

Does the plane work? Of course it does. [Samm] took his plane for a few laps around the neighborhood and found the plane flies excellently. It is horrifically loud, but it is a great example of how much anyone can do with cheap RC planes constructed out of foam.

Continue reading “Flying Planes With Squirrel Cages” →

32C3: A Free And Open Source Verilog-to-Bitstream Flow For ICE40 FPGAs

December 29, 2015 by Elliot Williams 10 Comments

[Clifford] presented a fully open-source toolchain for programming FPGAs. If you don’t think that this is an impressive piece of work, you don’t really understand FPGAs.

The toolchain, or “flow” as the FPGA kids like to call it, consists of three parts: Project IceStorm, a low-level tool that can build the bitstreams that flip individual bits inside the FPGA, Arachne-pnr, a place-and-route tool that turns a symbolic netlist into the physical stuff that IceStorm needs, and Yosys which synthesizes Verilog code into the netlists needed by Arachne. [Clifford] developed both IceStorm and Yosys, so he knows what he’s talking about.

What’s most impressive is that FPGAs aren’t the only target for this flow. Because it’s all open source and modifiable, it has also been used for designing custom ASICs, good to know when you’re in need of your own custom silicon. [Clifford]’s main focus in Yosys is on formal verification — making sure that the FPGA will behave as intended in the Verilog code. A fully open-source toolchain makes working on this task possible.

If you’ve been following along with [Al Williams]’s FPGA posts, either this introduction or his more recent intermediate series that are also based on the relatively cheap Lattice iCEStick development kit, this video is a must-watch. It’s a fantastic introduction to the cutting-edge in free FPGA tools.