Traxxas Gearing Chart
I can never find this exact gearing chart online when I need it, so I’ve taken a pic of the one that came with my Slash and uploading it here for posterity. Good for the Rustler, Bandit, and Stampede.
How to Adjust CPU Fan Speed on a Gigabyte Motherboard (Z97N-WIFI)
The Gigabyte BIOS is so un-intuitive that I’m documenting my notes in case it helps anyone else. While searching online I did not find any answers on how to adjust the CPU Fan Speed. Maybe it didn’t come up while searching because it’s so easy for everybody else to find that there’s no need to document it. I’m good at detecting ambiguity. It is my special gift. So here’s how. Get in to the BIOS by holding the Del key…
How to Remove Integrated WiFi from Linux
I’ve been having terrible problems with my wifi disconnecting randomly. It seems the problem is with the Intel driver, called iwlwifi. I thought I solved it by turning off the Power Management setting for the driver, but the problem returned after 24 hours. The big headache is that the wifi interface is part of the motherboard. Removing the interface from BIOS was not an available option. I also knew that trying to ignore it by simply inserting a USB dongle doesn’t…
Freewriting in Linux
One of the most influential websites in my life was 750words.com. It is a site that encourages you to write every single day, about any thing really. Freewriting. I noticed that it helped me focus the rest of the day on my priorities. Even though there was a lot of junk words, after about 20 minutes I’d almost always have at least one genuine insight about something I wanted to do. So I started writing those down in lists of…
Wifi Keeps Disconnecting in Ubuntu
Found a solution to a problem that has been plaguing me for months. My wifi would disconnect randomly, unable to recover and requiring a reboot. The solution was not simple to find. Sharing my notes here in case it helps someone else. The problem seems to be the wireless interface’s Power Management. And the solution was simply to turn it off. I narrowed the problem down by watching the syslog until the moment it happened: tail -f /var/log/syslog In the…
Atbash Cipher as an Algorhithm
Today I realized Atbash can done as an algorithm, rather than looking up a hard-coded dictionary of an alphabet to its reversed alphabet. You could encrypt using the alphabet’s array index as: -i +25 It’s that simple. Example: Assuming you have a list of an alphabet, index(i) will get the plaintext chacter’s position. Then negate it and add 25, and now you have the index position of the Atbash character. Slick! Complete Code: Output: No more rhymes now, I mean…
Atbash Cipher in Python
I just finished listening to The Da Vinci Code audiobook and am feeling inspired to noodle with some cryptograms in Python. One of the clues in the story involves a word written Atbash. This is a simple substitution cipher where the encrypted characters are mapped to the reverse of the alphabet: A -> Z B -> Y C -> X … Z -> A Now let’s write a Python script to do this It’s been a while since I…
Valuable Lessons on Autonomous Boats
Testing is crucial. These are my notes from things I learned on today’s autonomous boat tests. Do not program GPS coordinates at 5am! This is critical. The boat went out to the middle of the lake and stopped. It took me several moments to realize it did exactly what I asked it to do. I failed to enter in return coordinates. The shoreline is dynamic. Do not trust Google Maps, even in satellite view, when getting GPS values close to…
First Autonomous Open Water Test with the Aquacraft Wildcat
Took the boat out to the lake for its first open water autonomous test. It worked well. The turning rate happened to be perfect for the (nearly) slowest speed it can go. It navigated three GPS points, one lap across the cove and back. The existing lid to the boat doesn’t fit with an Arduino Uno plus servo shield sitting on top so I ran it without a lid. After the first a lap I brought it in to…
Reading PWM Signals of an Aquacraft Wildcat RC Boat
These are my notes on connecting an Arduino to an Aquacraft Wildcat RC boat and reading the PWM signals for the Servo and ESC during the arming sequence. Reading the Servo PWM was as simple as connecting one wire from the receiver signal pin(usually white) for the Servo channel to a PWM input pin on the Arduino and using the same sketch I used to read a Traxxas radio. The only other wire needed was to create a common ground,…