The garage project (a.k.a. Shed-04) has begun! Siding is down, just waiting to get the foundation going!

Garage Side!

The wing model of the Bearhawk is some 90% complete! Next up is working on the fuselage and learning the weldaments features in Solidworks.

90% completed wing!!!

The modeling of the Bearhawk airplane project is back online! A section has been created under the Bearhawk project menu to track all the modeling progress on this project.

Click here for a direct link to the page.

Wing with mostly complete Aileron

Flap Drive Mechanics

The Bearhawk!

The Bearhawk project is back! After a long time off line (due to the loss of the previous website), the Bearhawk airplane project is getting back online! More information is available under the new Beahawk menu.

On another note, icons have been added to the menu! Now I just need to get some that dont look quite so ugly.

So the APP-02 had its second flight! You can read more about it on the APP-02 page here.

The first run of the APP-02 airplane went down last night! It was a resounding success. The DA-50 single cylinder engine vibrates fairly aggressively at low RPMs. This issue will likely have to be addressed after reviewing the first flight video to see how the vibration works out in the air.

The issue with the vibration may be a ground related issue and might be dampened when in flight. If not the gimbal will be re-mounted on a foam shock pad.

The video of the first run will be uploaded once it has been edited and compressed.

Minor update, put together a little video snippet for youtube about the GoPro gimbal mount in the APP-02 airplane.

The Gimbal mount is completed! The camera just hast to be fully mounted in it once the gimbal is finally mounted in the frame. It turns out that it was a good thing to get such a beast of a plane… all this camera equipment is going to take up a large amount of space, especially when the SLR is finally mounted in there.

Check out the mount page for all the information.

Gimbal mount & GoPro mounted

So the news today is a seemingly minor update to the website that took quite a bit of work to implement. The fancy new menu system! Ta da!

The new menu system is powered by jQuery UI, quite possibly the most flexible and easy to use user interface (UI) development framework out there! It took a couple of days of trying to do it with a custom solution before realizing the ease and power of jQuery UI. The new system even remembers what menu entries were open when navigating pages   No cookies were used or harmed in the making of this menu.

The graphics have also been updated slightly to look a little nicer. At some point some nice context appropriate icons will be put in there too (maybe).

As for the other projects, the APP-02 platform is getting really close to its first flight. The only thing remaining is to install the switches when they arrive, and the GoPro mount. There will be a new projects page opened up soon for the GoPro mount that is being built for the APP-02.

Enjoy!

So WordPress is basically the best. Just updated the site to the latest version of WordPress and it was actually completely painless. The site was down for maybe 30 seconds. Hopefully it stays painless. Time to experiment with the new media manager!