Author Archives: Mike

About Mike

I'm a software engineer. Look into the about page for more information about me.

2nd Annual Summer Solstice DLG Soaring Competition

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This past weekend, June 12th through the 14th, I participated in the 2nd Annual Summer Solstice DLG Soaring Competition outside of Orlando, FL. This event was a F3K competition flown with DLG gliders. It was my first time participating in a DLG competition. It was fun! The event took place over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It was held at the Orlando Buzzards Christmas, FL field. The Buzzards have a really nice field for glider flying. It was the second time I have flown a competition at the field.   Since this was my first DLG contest I didn’t place real high. … Continue reading →

Chrome and ADB Device Detection Issue

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Lately I’ve been working on an app for viewing Spektrum Telemetry on Android. While I’m using the Ionic Framework and Apache’s Cordova project to do the UI, I still need to do native functions. I’ve written my own plugin to do these functions. While working on my native functionality I’ve come across the need to debug in order to see how certain things behave while running on my Nexus devices. To do this I need to have ADB recognize my device. Lately I’ve been having an issue where I have no devices detected on any of my machines. This baffled … Continue reading →

Florida Soaring Society Contest #3

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I participated in the Florida Soaring Society’s third contest of the year at the Indian River Kontrol Society’s field just west of Cocoa, FL. The contest was well put on by John Graves and his wife Kim. The whole weekend was a blast. I also had my best flying of the year! Continue reading →

Spektrum Telemetry Reader – Pre-Alpha Build

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Here’s a little update on a project I’ve been working on. The Spektrum Telemetry Reader is an Android app to read Spektrum telemetry data. The Spektrum Telemetry Reader I’ve completed another alpha build of the Telemetry Reader for Android. It’s relatively stable. Obviously there are ways to make it crash. I’m mainly using it as a visual verification that the data from the library is coming back correctly. I’m also attempting my first hybrid application using the Ionic Framework (an extension of Cordova) and want to validate some of the design choices that I’ve made. Download the compressed APK: Telemetry Reader for Android … Continue reading →

Flying the Sunbird

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If you’ve been following my Sunbird series you’ll know that in the last posts I covered and finished the wing. I had to run an errand after work which got me home a little earlier than I normally do. I immediately got into finish the glider mode. The ailerons setup was pretty easy, just like any other ARF. I setup and made mounts for the wing bolts and drilled the holes in the wing. Basically, I was done! I had two OrangeRX receivers in my electronics box. Now, I’ve had a bunch of these receivers and have had no problems with … Continue reading →

Covering the Sunbird Wing

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The major covering tasks on the Sunbird have been completed. Just a few more items on the list until I can get the glider out for test flights Continue reading →

Covering the Sunbird

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Most people hate covering a model. While it’s not my favorite thing, I’d rather be out flying, I think I enjoy putting the covering on more than actually doing the building. I’ll admit it is frustrating and I’m not good at it. I often get to the point of frustration where I shortcut stuff or don’t do things correct because I just want it done. However, in my eyes covering is more like actually completing the model. When it is covered it is ready to go! I decided to go with Ultracote Lite covering. It is a great covering material. … Continue reading →

Dell Latitude Laptop Processor Stuck at 800MHz

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At home I use a Dell Latitude laptop which I found discarded. I’ve been using Xbuntu on it for over a year. It has been OK. It’s nothing blazing fast or great, but it works for doing some basic side development. Recently, I noticed that my CPUFreq-indicator was never moving off the lowest level. I tried changing the CPU governor to performance but nothing changed. I ran cpufreq-info and got this message: current policy: frequency should be within 800 MHz and 800 MHz. The governor “performance” may decide which speed to use within this range. Crap! How To Fix I tried … Continue reading →

Moving Between GoDaddy Hosts

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For the life of this blog I’ve been using GoDaddy’s Economy hosting which was thrown in free with my domain name registration. The option was a very, very basic one, just designed to do some basic website hosting. My guess it was more for the use of parking the domain or doing a basic, “I’m Here!” site. Their documentation said that WordPress couldn’t be hosted on it. I didn’t see why it couldn’t and in the end proved you could by  hosting this blog. Now I don’t receive a ton of traffic, about 250 hits a day. I had no … Continue reading →

Sunbird Update

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The continuation of my HobbyKing SunBird build… Building the Wings Without having any plans this build is a bit harder than it should be. I ended up not using the joiner between the center panel and wing tip. After reading more on this and re-reading the instructions like 10 times I know this was a mistake, but the horrible instructions provided by HobbyKing made this impossible to understand. After getting the outer tips finished I trimmed off the excess spar material. I’m not sure if I was supposed to do this, but it seems like it needed to be done in … Continue reading →