Day: May 1, 2019

The Stratolaunch Is Flying, But Can It Do Cargo?

May 1, 2019 by 32 Comments

The world’s largest aircraft is flying. Stratolaunch took to the skies in test flights leading up to its main mission to take rockets up to 20,000 feet on the first stage of their flight to space. But the Stratolaunch is a remarkable aircraft, a one-of-a-kind, and unlike anything ever built before. It can lift a massive 250 tons into the air, and it can bring it back down again.

By most measures that matter, the Stratolaunch is the largest aircraft ever flown. It has the largest wingspan of any aircraft, and it has the largest cargo capacity of any aircraft. In an industry that is grasping at interesting and novel approaches to spaceflight like rockoons and a small satellite launcher from a company whose CTO is still a junior in college, the Stratolaunch makes unexpected sense; this is a launch platform above the clouds, that can deliver a rocket to orbit, on time.

But the Stratolaunch is much more than that. This is an aircraft whose simple existence deserves respect. And, like others of its kind, the Antonov AN-225, the Spruce Goose, there is only one. Even if it never launches a rocket, the Stratolaunch will live on by the simple nature of its unique capabilities. But what are those capabilities? Is it possible for the Stratolaunch to serve as a cargo plane? The answer is more interesting than you think.

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Parasite ATtiny Resets Your ESP32 For You

May 1, 2019 by 28 Comments

Embedded development can be a tough process. Between weird electrical gremlins, obscure bugs and our own mistakes, it can be a real struggle at times. To keep cognitive loads to a minimum, it’s best to make sure your tools are as simple and easy to use as possible. [tech] got tired of having to push a button to prepare the ESP32 for programming, and decided to solve the problem.

The solution comes via another microcontroller, in this case an ATtiny9. The small device listens in on the ESP32’s serial receiving pin. When it detects the Arduino IDE’s boot sequence on the line, it switches the BOOT0 and RESET lines on the ESP32, emulating the button presses to force it into programming mode.

Once you’ve become accustomed to one-click programming your ESP boards, you’re not going to want to go back. We could imagine this hack being replicated in a tidy piggyback format so it could be moved from board to board as workflow dictates.

If you’ve got an ESP32 lying around and don’t know what to do with it, you could always consider getting into game development.

 

Battlebots To The Skies!

May 1, 2019 by 10 Comments

If you’re too young to remember Battlebots on the television, there are two things that you should know. First is that there are plenty of highlights of this epic robot battle royale on YouTube, and the second is that now there’s an even better version with drones instead of robots merely confined to land. It’s called DroneClash 2019, and it looks like it was amazing.

Not only were the robots set up in a box and asked to battle each other, they first had to navigate down a corridor with anti-drone measures. The drones have to make it through and into a battle royale in the final room. If this wasn’t good enough, the event was opened by a prince of the Netherlands and is put on by a university.

This is an annual event to push the state of the art in drone and anti-drone tech, but we’d be happy to see it optioned for a TV show. If it doesn’t, you might be satisfied with a giant human-driven robot competition from a while back, or maybe just head down the rabbit hole of old Battlebots clips.

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