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Should I expect a letter from you, then? 
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What's your address?
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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_Damian S_ wrote: 127.0.0.1
We must be neighbors then. Raise your hand and I'll try to see you.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Dan Neely wrote: I was just coming here to post a link myself.
Repost. CP loves that. 
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Site's back up for me.
And LOL! That's AWESOME!
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
---
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
---
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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Glitter?, when a simple FOAD works so well!
New version: WinHeist Version 2.1.0
There's a fine line between crazy and free spirited and it's usually a prescription.
I'm currently unsupervised, I know it freaks me out too but the possibilities are endless.
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It appears that the site is back up but not accepting purchases - one can only imagine they have taken so many orders they're set to retire on the proceeds!
And they're Aussies!
Makes you proud!
PooperPig - Coming Soon
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Yep, I did note that!! Did you check out the FAQ's? Funny stuff!!
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That is damn annoying.
A friend's very young daughter did that with the Christmas cards a couple of years ago, and I still find small pockets of the stuff when I hoover...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I'd pay to have something similar sent to the owner of a web-site who calls me (and all of its potential customers) "you f***ing idiot".
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Yes, at that point I figured it was a couple of uni students or similar...
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I smite thee with glitter! I strike ye down with the shiny stuff! For I am tinkerbell! Lord of the bells that tinker.
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We had a brief outage on one of our 69 kV transmission lines last week, and had a heck of a time finding the cause. It turned out to be a flashover on a failed insulator, and it had to be located on foot using binoculars because the affected pole is located in sugar sand where a line truck can't go. Repairing it was a challenge, as well, since we had to rent a tracked bulldozer to drag the line truck to the structure and back again. Since we have a number of poles located where trucks can't easily get to them, we have no practical way to inspect these lines to locate potential failures until they actually occur.
I'd like to buy a quad copter with good usable range, equipped with a video camera of decent quality and resolution. Ideally, the camera would allow real time viewing from the controller, or a GPS recording of position so that a problem can be located later after the survey is done. I think I can sell the boss on something in the $1000 - $2000 range, if such a beast exists. I know there are enthusiasts here - any suggestions for a solution?
Thanks!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Parrot makes drones. I think they're in the price range you mentioned.
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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No matter what kind of aircraft you use, you may want to take a look at a FPV system.[^].
Flying in First Person View actually is fun and personally I would not use a quadcopter. Instead I would go with a single main rotor and a tail rotor, just as Igor Sikorsky meant it to be. 
A T-Rex450[^] is relatively inexpensive, parts are easily available and the quality is quite good. There are only few plastic parts. The chassis is mostly made of carbon fiber and the mechanical parts like the rotor head are made of aluminium alloy.
Take a look at this video[^] of a T-Rex 550 with FPV.
Edit: In any case, how are your flying skills?
Edit^2: You wanted to inspect power lines?[^]
Esit^3: Here is a recent picture of my T-Rex 450.[^]. I had to mount the receiver/flybarless unit on the side to have access to it for setup and adjustments. Inside the chassis there would now be some room for the FPV and telemetry transmitter...
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
modified 13-Jan-15 19:48pm.
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Looks great, but how much extra is the camera system? Or is that included?
Will Rogers never met me.
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I must admit, I don't know. There are all kinds of modular devices that you can combine and I have not yet put together a system for any purpose. For details you should look up a good store anyway and get some advice and perhaps a good price on what you need.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
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We forgot something very importatnt!
You may need a transmitter and a receiver before you can fly anything at all. I use a spectrum DX8[^] together with a AR7200BX flybarless receiver and stabilisation [^]. There are cheaper options and also other manufacturers, but you will need a decent range and reliability.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
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Undoubtedly choppers have a higher cool factor than Quads (or multi-copters) do.
However, they're more difficult to control and have a higher mechanical complexity and repair cost.
Out of curiosity, what benefit do you see in using a chopper rather than a multi-copter?
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enhzflep wrote: Undoubtedly choppers have a higher cool factor than Quads (or multi-copters) do.
True
enhzflep wrote: However, they're more difficult to control and have a higher mechanical
complexity and repair cost
Not so true.
Light crashes usually cost you a main shaft and the feathering shaft. For a 450 class hlicopter that would be about 10 bucks. Next in line are the gears, which is a good thing. The motors don#t like to be stopped abruptly or being banged around. Whatever I did, I have not yet killed a motor yet. The exposed motors of a quadcopter tend to suffer more in a crash, as I hear.
Harder to fly is a bit subjective. I don't see much of a difference, actually. It does not matter much wether I tilt the swashplate to tilt the rotor plane or wether I simply tilt the entire quadcopter.
One big difference I see is that it is harder to recognize the current attitude of a quadcopter due to it's symmetrical shape. And you know how misinterpreting what you see of your copter, followed by a wrong command, will end.
The mechanical complexity may be higher, but once properly set up it makes the copter more reliable. Last summer I had 150 flights without a single incident. Then I lost one of the swashplate servos in mid flight. The helicopter went into a steep dive, but I was able to compensate, get it into a stable hover, carefully get it back and (hardest of all with a dead servo) manage an acceptable landing.
That worked because I was flying and not some microcontroller. I doubt that many quadcopters can recover from the loss of, let's say, a motor. And the less skill the pilot needs, the less the pilot can do in case of a failure, which is only a question of time.
Last, I fly for fun. It's interesting because it's hard and simply pushing a button 'Fly' would be boring.
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
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 Thanks for your thoughts.
I think that your use of the word subjective was perfect. Without exposure to a range of experiences, it can be easy to mis-label something as fact.
It sure sounds like you've been having fun with your Trex. I've got a Blade MSR and a Blade SR sitting around somewhere, also have flown a mates Blade450 and I found with the exception of the MSR, them to be incredibly twitchy and verging on hateful machines.
The cheapest I ever got out of fixing the SR was about $35 - having done the blades, main shaft, feathering shaft and main gear. I don't miss flying it! ( I guess I'm just a crappy heli pilot. :grin: )
Nice save when the servo gave-up. Would loved to have seen that exciting few seconds.
I guess coloured props and/or lighting on quads only goes so far to help with orientation - the tail of a heli sure makes that part easier.
I moved on (backwards!?) and got into flying planes. I find it infinitely more satisfying than either quads or helis. It's also dirt cheap, which makes it a lot easier to give the kids a go. If I had $1 for every time I've watched one drive it vertically into the ground nose first, only to put on a new prop and toss it back into the air, I'd have paid for 80% of my broken $1 GWS props. :laughs:
OT: Hey, how'd you go with the gyro question you asked the other day, make any headway? It was amongst the more interesting questions I've seen recently.
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The Blade 450 can take a beating. Actually, the 150 flights and the dead servo were on my older Blade 450 3D. What do you have against the 450 class? They are not as nervous as small helis, don't cost too much and still have plenty of power. Compared with a Blade 130X, somebody said that flying a Blade 450 feels like driving a bus.
Smaller helicopters, even including the 450 class, are known not to be good for learning how to fly. They are extremely agile and also react strongly to wind. The Blade SR is plain junk. It is already to big not to have a real tail rotor instead of one driven by a separate (brushed!) motor. Anyway, you can tame the small Blades with more restrictive DR/Expo settings.
The only exception may be the tiny Blade Nano CPX. I learned to fly with one of those and now it has been tuned with an aluminium rotor head, brushless motor and an adapter to use the batteries from an MCPX with twice the capacity of the stock batteries. The only problem is the tail rotor. The motor is too weak to counter the torque of the brushless motor at full throttle. Anyway, Blade parts are relatively expensive. A T-Rex has only very little plastic, unlike the Blades. It's also more expensive, but for some reason the parts cost less while generally being of higher quality.
Learning with bigger classes may be easier, but only if you have a teacher. else it will soon become a very expensive hobby.
And yes, I found one project where you have to solder your own hardware and then upload the program code and another one which has been discontinued, but was based on Arduino boards.
Look here![^]
The language is JavaScript. that of Mordor, which I will not utter here
This is Javascript. If you put big wheels and a racing stripe on a golf cart, it's still a f***ing golf cart.
"I don't know, extraterrestrial?"
"You mean like from space?"
"No, from Canada."
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