hi, only got one battery pack at the moment, so thought I would give it some pre flight checks and just a gentle hover.
This was a pre built heli so did the usual visual and mechanical checks, and noticed the tail rotor was not moving fully across it range.

Had a look in radio settings and servo set for 100% travel, thought perhaps that is all that this one needs, WRONG the blades span up clock wise and the whole heli span anti clock ways. This on 1/4 throttle further investigation found the culprit, the guy who built it had forgotten to tighten the tail servo bracket to tail boom and I missed it too

So I found the position on tail boom where the servo arm was at 90% and tail rotor in middle tightened it up and gave it another go.
Tail rotor slider now moved equally both ways, so up the throttle and it lifted up to a great hover at about five feet, noise was awesome.

No room to do any flying in garden so brought it down again, my hands where shaking by this time anyway the noise and power from it compared to my little king will take some getting used too.

waiting now for some more battery packs before taking it up to the field, to say I am like a puppy with two tails would be an understatement.

Yesterday I got asked to take part in several projects within Sun that will be sold to the government over the next few years. The projects will use Sun's embedded devices called SunSPOTs (Sun Small Programmable Object Technology, kinda like gumstix, wikipedia & sunspotworld clickies).

Today I got given a set, two SunSPOTs and a base station. This weekend I'll be playing with them to see what I can make them do, a friend modded some remote control cars (clicky), making the SunSPOTs control lights and music, I'll be seeing what they could do in 'real life' and 'mission critical' applications.

I've also messed up a production server at work, so seeing as we powered down the lab and have electricians in to add more power, I can treat this machine like a yo-yo

I'd better kick off my first reboot actually...

Hopefully on sunday I go soccer dome.

As always on Saturdays, it's nearly time for me to head off to badminton practise.

What was the old saying, give a man a fish and he will feed himself for a day, teach him to fish and he will sit on the river bank drinking beer forever.
Something like that anyway

I've curried some pig and made dough for chappati. I shall be making jeera rice and a vegetable dish and consuming with good company, good wine and good whisky.

I'll probably post something unintelligible again about 3am when I'm done

Well, after saying I was going to do various things...I didn't...

I played with the production server, but couldn't get it to upgrade, one package failed and it threw up loads of errors, so I've reverted back to the previous version...

I tried playing with the SunSPOTs, but my Mac was busy doing other things and failed to open the installer, will have to wait for the DVD to finish ripping...

Today I've been motivated to do two things: Drawn some pork in cider and sit it in the oven for ten hours, and make a rhubarb crumble...

The pork will be ready at about 6:30, I'll then stick the crumble in a little after, it's been made for about an hour now...

Today (sunday), me and the wife popped to the science museum to see Wallace and Gromit cracking contraptions. It was a great day and a well worth a vist.
some photos I took