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Sunday, March 11, 2012

Analog Hipster

So first off, I saw these awesome tights from Black Milk. So fabulous.


They're circuit board leggings and they're a little pricey, but I think worth it for the novelty. I got Black Milk's Purple Galaxy Leggings as a Christmas present. I swear, they are the best leggings ever. They're really durable and thick like under armor. Go buy these for yourself (or screen print your own layout) because they are hilariously baller. 

Second off, I'm going to make an analog quadrotor. It's gonna be named Babycopter! :D 

....

So basically, I got super excited about quadrotors (well, n-rotors) after I saw this gorgeous video of a Cinestar octorotor. 



After I made Segboard, I discovered I want to learn all the things about PID controllers. And what better thing to try after Segboard than 2 Segboards! Together! In the sky!

A quadrotor is essentially the same as 2 Segboards, except you secretly have 3 axises (yaw, pitch, and roll) rather than one and you have flying baby brushless motors!

So why analog?

Well, Segboard was all digital, and I want to try being an analog hipster. I've always wanted to make analog controls with active filters and such, so yay!

Also, er, well.....

My secret goal of this project is to have a quadrotor for 6.115 (my microcontroller class). However, the main terror of this class is that everything is done in 8051 ASSEMBLY. EVERY SINGLE PROGRAM. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

I've never missed compilers so much in my life. ;_;

The true other reason for analog is because I don't want to implement floating point in assembly. Heck, even fixed point with software filters of like 0.9### is horrible enough and wah I hate 16 bit and 32 bit math waaaaaaaaaaaaah.

Essentially, what I want to do is do all the math for my sensors in analog. This should theoretically be fine because they're all analog accelerometers and gyroscopes! The only bad thing is that analog is also tricky and hard and magical, but I'd rather be better at analog magic than assembly magic. Least for this project.

I do, however, plan to make 8051 motor controllers. This should be perfectly fine and dandy and I like motors anyway so yeah.

Think of it this way - whether through analog or assembly, magic is still magic. Least Imma tell myself that at night.

Oh well!
Jordan