While flying 10,500 at 125mph I notice that we are rapidly approaching some airspace. For those that don’t know, Airspace is the equivalent of lanes on a highway. It separates different types of air traffic so everyone can play nicely. As you can imagine, having 747’s flying around in the same area as Crop dusters could create something of a problem.

As we’re approaching the airspace, I break out a chart and look to see if I can get some more information about it. The GPS was saying RES MOA Mojave. Seemed reasonable enough. The chart confirmed my suspicions that we seemed to be busting this airspace like Chris Hanson on to Catch A Predator.

Now, relatively sure of our whereabouts and the situation, I piped up. “I think we’re in some restricted airspace.” I said to my friend sitting in the left seat. I kind of pointed to the purple line on the GPS, hoping it would add to my credibility. “Well, We’re on flight following, they’d probably let us know.” He said. And that kind of rang true in my mind.

So, I stuck my face back in the chart to find some more information about the MOA, still unsure of what MOA stood for. After burying my face in the chart for another minute I mention again, “I’m pretty sure we’re in this MOA Space here and we’re not supposed to be… and we can fly a couple minutes outside of it pretty easily.” I said. Whilst discussing the merits of what this would accomplish, the radio chimes in, “8 SIERRA ECHO FOXTROT, YOU’VE BREACHED AN ACTIVE MOA AIRSPACE FOR EDWARDS AIRFORCE BASE. TURN HEADING 170 IMMEDIATE LEFT TURN.”

The right wing of the airplane shot skyward as we turned left. In the distance I saw an airport … It was Edwards AirForce base.

As I was standing at the contest Saturday morning it had become clear to me why the MOA was active. A double sonic boom hit my chest pretty hard. It was the Space Shuttle, and it was landing at Edwards Airforce Base that morning. So, you know, My bad and all that.

HOW I DID IT: I’ve had an iPhone for about a year now, and find it quite indispensable. It’s handy in so many situations, and fits into a lot of nerdy stuff I do. However, it hasn’t fit in perfectly to the main nerdy thing that I like to do: Fly radio control airplanes and helicopters. For that, I use a really high quality piece of hardware from a company called JR, a JR 9303 radio. It works great. However, one day it occurred to me, how cool would it be to use my iPhone to fly my RC stuff? The answer was “So cool” obviously. I tossed around the idea for a couple of months and ultimately gave up on it because the iPhone doesn’t have a receiver I can put in the airplane to fly it with.

So the idea sat untouched while I learned how to program stuff on the iPhone for other nerdy purposes. My roommate requested I make a chadwick balancer for him using the accelerometers. (For those who don’t know, this is a device they use in real and model helicopters to find out if something is not balanced. Main blades, tail blades, shafts, gears etc…) While I was learning about the accelerometer functions in the iPhone, the idea pinged me again, and I thought, How cool would it be to fly an R/C model using the accelerometers inside the iPhone?! Alas, still no receiver.

IMAC Season came and went, and so did indoor season. I was busy practicing for contests I knew I’d be beat at, and building planes I knew were way to good for me. =) Then, one fateful day, I deleted some PHP program I was working on by accident. This was a LOT of work, and I was exceptionally pissed off about it. I was distracted by some girl in my bed (Don’t EVAR program PHP with a girl(s) in your bed!) and maybe a beer or six in my blood. I was writing a series of test programs for a SOAP interface, and had named one of them 8.php. (The more seasoned nerds among you can probably see where this is going). The program had turned into a complete disaster and was causing “internal server errors”, and I wanted to delete it. While girl was yammering in my ear I typed rm *.php instead of rm 8.php, and hit enter. Deleting every php file in the folder. Hours of hard work gone into the void.

The next day I went and bought a time capsule from Apple so this would never happen again. The side effect of this was that I had a Linksys 54 to play around with. I always had this grandiose idea of building a WIFI sniffer/jammer. I figured there may have been some people playing around with these routers. And gosh, was I right.

The DD-WRT project is a group of people who have reverse engineered many popular brands of routers and have managed to load a small linux distribution. As soon as I saw that they had independent programs running, it hit me like a bolt of lightning: My planes and helis don’t need a receiver if they are carrying around the server. If I could carry around the router on board, I could fly my stuff.

So I started scheming. There were a lot of problems to be solved, and I am only just so nerdy. I made a list:

1. How do I get the router to talk to the servos? How much current can ethernet handle?
2. How do I control throttle with no stick?
3. What is the latency going to be like from iPhone->Router->Program->Servo?
4. What is the range of WiFi? Good enough for RC?
5. Can I fly with the accelerometers? I’m a stick banger. BIG time. How does one add expo to this?
6. Whose planes can I test this on? >=)

So I had my basic idea down. iPhone joins the Linksys router network. It gets an IP address. Then, I open up my pilot program. The pilot program interfaces with the router via SSH (I couldn’t think of a better way that has redundancy, and speed, and was already buily by someone else). The pilot program interprets what the iphone is doing, and outputs data to one of the ethernet ports of which there are conveniently 4. Rudder, Ailerons, Throttle, Elevator.

Once I had that idea all drawn up, I said “great, I’ll file this in the ‘projects I’ll claim to have come up with once someone else does all the work’” file. However, my friends and roommates kept egging me on, especially as more and more of them got and loved their phones. They wanted to be able to fly stuff too! Just to say they can.

So the first order of business was to come up with a user interface for the iPhone to fly things with. I know how my JR Transmitter works, but it’s a whole different beast: it has sticks and buttons. So, I came up with a simple “flight interface” for the iPhone. It’s sinfully ugly, but brutally functional. It has a couple of things that I felt were important:

1. Throttle Lock/Cut
2. Visual Throttle Cue so you can see if the throttle is at full and you’re not getting power to the plane. Also, the phone will vibrate depending on different throttle positions. Full throttle gets a hearty shake out of the old girl.
3. Network status (Based on ping latency)
4. Really difficult to accidentally quit.
5. Ability to eventually use more than one engine. (Just in case).
6. Cool looking throttle levers like the big boys use.

The program itself wasn’t too hard to make using Xdev, the iPhone/OS X development suite. The interface was pretty easy, but there was a lot of code behind tapping all the accelerometers at once. To further complicate things, how I tilt the phone may be different from how someone else tilts it.

There were some major hurdles. While range testing one night, I received a call from a girl. She was pretty insistent on me going to a party or something. So now I had two huge problems, incoming calls would kill the link to the craft, and I had to figure out if I had any clean clothes without R/C Logos on them to wear out.

The other problem I ran into was that the Linksys router can actually work on a lot of different voltages. Ironically, it’s very happy at nine volts, the max output voltage for the Castle Creations Castle link.

Finally, you may ask how the servos are being driven. Well, routers are used to send bits of information down a series of twisted pair wires usually. Guess what it takes to send packeted information? An IC that would work really well as a PWM! I did some haxoring around on this, and read what other nerds had done on the internet, and the next think you know I have a servo with a Cat5E plug on the end of it. Below is a small video I made of some of the earlier tests, the first real successful flight test, and an interesting near miss at the very end.

]]> http://www.myauntishot.com/2009/full-scale-airplanes/rc-planes/how-to-use-an-iphone-to-fly-rc-airplanes-and-helicopters/feed 76 http://www.myauntishot.com/2007/funny/the-mile-high-club http://www.myauntishot.com/2007/funny/the-mile-high-club#comments Sun, 01 Jul 2007 05:51:05 +0000 Josh http://myauntishot.com/2007/06/the-mile-high-club Cold air was blowing up my pant leg from the vent near the rudder pedals, and I had a giant chart sprawled over me like a blanket. Sunlight poured in the cockpit. It was a beautiful day 10,500 feet over Northern Arizona.

I found myself on the way to Henderson, Nevada; a small suburb south of Las Vegas. It was only two weeks earlier my enterprising roommate asked me if I would help him with a small start up venture we codenamed “Mile High”. He’d done some maintenance work for a local gentleman flying “Romantic Scenic Flights” in the Phoenix area.

The idea came about that Phoenicians are prudes, and that the only town this could be wildly profitable in was Las Vegas. We sat down, and made a checklist: We were going to launch a small business in 14 days. The itemized checklist seemed almost insurmountable; insurance, websites, 1800 numbers, flyers, landing fees. It was a veritable maze of bureaucracy.

I found myself so emotionally invested in the project that it was keeping me up at night. The logistics were particularly complicated. I also found myself wrestling with the ethical repercussions of flying in the ‘Sin Ship’. What if two guys show up? What if two chicks show up? Is it suddenly not ok to use the term “Cockpit”? I was terrified that two lesbians would show up and my carefully rehearsed “ahhhhh Ladies and Gentleman….” would become useless. All those hours in the shower wasted.

With “D-Day” rapidly approaching we made a trip to Walmart for our own version of “Pimp My Plane”. The back of the plane had to look phenomenal. This was no second rate operation, and even though neither of us had any sort of interior design experience, we were determined to create quite the love nest. We found some plush pillows, tiny bottles of champagne, a metal garbage can in which to keep said champagne, some lovely curtain fabric, and of course fake roses on a vine. It was high class.

I started to have reservations when a Mom gave me the dirtiest look of my life. It was only then that it dawned on me: here were two guys walking around Walmart in the middle of the day with Champagne, Roses, and Pillows asking each other “Do you think this will look good?”, or “Is this too tacky?” I suddenly felt compelled to start talking about Ex-girlfriends that were total whores.

The day had come, and I found myself very excited. I’ve yet to go to Vegas since I’ve been 21, and I’ve never flown there in a small plane. I felt like a major P-I-M-P. We had one goal: To get one mile high flight. It was simple. And it should have been relatively easy, but time just wasn’t on our side.

We only had one method of advertising. I had the great (at the time) idea of dressing up like pilots, finding the guys handing out gentleman club leaflets, set up shop next to them and hand out our fliers. After all, I looked like money in my Pilot getup. How could anyone say no?

Not one person said ‘No’. By the time I was done, I wished I heard more “No”s. Vegas, as a city, has a very high blood alcohol level, and this made for some particularly colorful comments. The best I believe were:

1) From a drunk middle aged woman: “Are you the captain of the Titanic?”

2) From a woman: “Is there a draft?”

3) From a gentleman with a Mohawk: “Whoa, I get to have sex on a plane?” Me: Sure Mohawk: “Do I get to have sex with you on an airplane?!” Me: “Someone has got to fly the plane”

Nobody really got that we were dressed as pilots. Maybe it was too subtle. The best response was from middle aged woman with their friends. They were rather predictable. It usually went something like, “[Belly Laugh] Oh wow, Sharon, Look at this, THE MILE HIGH CLUB! Wouldn’t this be crazy?” Then they’d kind of shift their gaze, and give me a look that’s probably very similiar to the look that a Cheetah gives it’s prey before they pounce. It’s the kind of look that makes you want to shower.

Not for lack of trying, but we didn’t get one customer. I’m sure we could have worked out something if my ethics were a bit more flexible, but I wasn’t about to take one for the team. I won’t be Cheetah bait.

We tore it up Saturday night in Vegas at the Voodoo Lounge on top of the Rio. If you’ve never been to the place, It’s awesome. I highly recommend it. I woke up very hung over on Sunday, and we didn’t get the wheels up until after 3. When we finally made it back to Phoenix I was ragged; It was super choppy on the way back. After some sleep, I felt better and could reflect on the experience as a good one.

If you happen to find yourself in the Las Vegas Metropolitan area, and are looking for a Romantic Scenic Flight, I would highly encourage you to check out www.LasVegasMileHigh.com or call 1-888-Mile-Hi-7 for more information.

I was ungodly nervous. I’ve been delaying my solo not because I’m not capable but because I don’t really fly often. I just wanted to make sure I was super sharp so I could nail it down. So I taxi out, and get the old, “Cessna 53751, Position and Hold on Runway 22R” For those who don’t understand the jargon, you just go to the middle of the runway and sit there until they say go. It’s not that common, and it really made me nervous just sitting there with 5000 feet of runway in front of me and no one sitting next me.

After what seemed like an eternity, I hear: “Cessna 53751, Clear for takeoff, 22R”. I hesitated a moment, said “TallyHo!” to myself, and advanced the throttle. I was a nervous busy bee going down that runway, but as soon as the wheels lifted off the ground, I was ice man. Cold water ran through my veins. It was awesome. I had total and complete confidence … which is good because if I didn’t I think that I’d have been in BIG trouble.

I did two of the nicest squeaker touch and goes of my life, and turned it around for a full stop landing. I’m still buzzing about it now. It was one of the most exhilerating things I’ve ever done. I feel like such a bad ass.

Next: Getting my grubby paws on someone’s Extra or something.

The picture says it all. I’m still walking around like I’ve nailed a porn star or something. I totally understand why pilots are such cocky fuckers now.

When I asked him what kind of blimp it was, he said it wasn’t a traditional blimp, but a giant Chalupa. I knew that I had to fly this thing. I’ve flown a ton of stuff, planes, helis, rocket planes, but never a blimp. After all, it goes like 5 miles an hour, how hard could it be?

We met up at the arena for a practice session to find an answer to my question. In short, blimps are fucking hard to fly. I hate to even admit this, being the ‘hotshot’ pilot that I pretend to be, but I crashed a blimp. Somehow, I got backwards on the thrusters, and it started going down. So what does one do when a blimp starts to head down? More power. Little did I know I was just powering it downward even faster.

As this 15 pound behemoth starts barreling towards center ice, I add more power in a desperate attempt to arrest the sink rate. However, it was in vein. It thumped itself right into center ice, where they drop the puck. I tried to play it off like it was on purpose since it was placed so perfectly. I was hoping no one would figure it out, but alas, my friends wont let me live it down that I crashed a blimp.

I eventually got it down good enough to feel comfortable flying it at a game. So at the very first game I fly it, I let my friend Alex fly it the first two times. He did a good job, we dropped the little chalupa coupons and all was well with the world. While we were setting it up to fly a third time, Blimp boy comes down and says his boss just called him, “The President of Taco Bell is in the audience tonight, and he thinks the blimp looks sad and saggy. We have to fill it up with some more helium.” I very professionally told him that the blimp is flying fine and if we’re going to change anything we should wait until we’re done for the day.

My recommendations went unheard. They filled up the blimp with more helium, put it out on the ice, and stuffed the transmitter in my hands. As I start to fly it, I notice that it seems a little bit more … spry … than it was before. As I start to fly it over the audience, I notice that it is moving upward very keenly. I turn the thrusters down and start to add power. It keeps heading on up. I add some power. It keeps going up. I put the thrusters to full power. It keeps pulling a “Jeffersons” on me: Moving on up.

At this point, panic starts to set in: This 15 pound Chalupa was rapidly moving towards very, very hot high power Halogen lights. The kind of lights that could readily melt a hole in such a noble airship. I started to freak out, I rotated the thrusters in an effort to get it over the ice; maybe get it in some cold sinking air. I rotated the wrong way, and started to drive this Chalupa in a Mezzanine. I just barely managed to avoid hitting a balcony. I’m sure the people there felt the prop wash from this thing. It was CLOSE.

By the grace of God, Jesus, Budha, or some combination of the three, I managed to get this thing into a column of sinking air. It started coming down. I managed to get it over center ice, just like where I crashed it before. I didn’t even bother to fly it back, I just stuck it to the ice and did the walk of shame to go get it. I have not felt that kind of stress with a transmitter in my hand since I learned how to fly.

Oh, during this whole drama, I kept dropping the little free Chalupa coupons.

The definition of grace under pressure.

As I was walking out, blimp boy says to me, “By the way, that balcony you almost hit, That was the VIP Section. The CEO of Taco Bell was sitting in the very section.”

Me: “Tell him that was all for his benefit.”

Joshua Ziering

(Remember, I am 6′3″)

Josh

It was about the same time.

About the time I stopped flying large airplanes by holding the transmitter in a deathgrip;

I got the coolest form of sponsorship.

Though the labels were faded, and it was a bit dusty, it was nontheless:

An Extra, 330.

97 inches of pure IMAC Plane.

Unlimited class airplane, capable of anything.

Tumbles, rolls, circles, hovers, and flying on the proverbial edge of the knife.

“Fuck” I thought. “I can’t build to save my life.”

With goals of national championships, I set off to build it nothing less than perfect.

Easily distracted, and damn near incompetent with tools, It took a little longer than planned.

It was a huge project. And with me leading the charge, it was most seriously undermanned.

After many nights of something resembling chimpanzees and sporting equipment,

I can finally say I’m on the last 5 percent.

Now, the small task of finishing it.

Damnit.

—————————————————————-

And yes, Those jeans are photo shopped on.

Josh

Friday night I went and flew my gas airplane, the Funtana .40. I managed to run two tanks of fuel through it before it was too dark to see it. It was a really good night. So as I pack up my airplane stuff, and start to drive home, I get a call from Scott. He invited me to go with him to his hangar to work on his airplane again. Of course I said yes. Airplanes are awesome! Last time, I got to watch him and this other guy work on his plane for the most part. This time it was: “Junior, get under the plane”. So they hoisted the plane up on some kind of stand or something so we could redo the landing gear straps. It was kind of fun actually working on an airplane. I tried not to think about what would happen should the stupid little hoist break. (They assured me it could hold a house or something.)

Instead of driving all the way home, Scott said I could crash on his couch. I jumped at that opportunity after the previous night’s drug dealing escapades. I managed to get a whole 7 hours of uninterrupted, quiet, peaceful sleep. It was just what I needed. I woke up at 10 to 6 on Saturday and went flying. While flying, I had my gas airplane kind of stop working on me. Let me tell you this, when you’re not that high up, and inverted, and the engine quits, it really makes you question your skills as a pilot. I managed to land it though. =)

So, while we were flying, this group of college kids shows up. They are part of the AIAA an aerospace group on campus. They entered a competition where they are building and flying a model plane. They talked to Scott for about a half hour. It’s clear that he’s an amazing teacher. He managed to convey SO MUCH information to these people in a very short time. And it all made sense. After he gave them this model airplane primer, He suggested that they let me join their group and pilot their plane. Sweet. So I made some aerospace nerd friends. I even flew for them a little bit, and I think they were impressed. When I talked to them yesterday they were damn impressed I could hover a plane, and then have the guts to catch it out of the air. Meh..

I spent all day at the Hobby Shop building an airplane for one of the homies. He gave me my gas airplane for free, so I said if he ever needs something built, I’m all over it. I did a pretty good job on the plane, but the problem is this guy crashes stuff left and right. No matter how well built a plane is, they’re built to fly, not to crash!

Sunday night, I went to go fly my Venus which I just shipped down from New Jersey. This plane was my pride and joy. I kind of pioneered a power setup for it, and did a lot of custom work on it. This was going to be the maiden flight with the new power setup, and a lot of new radio gear. Anyhow, the plane flew awesome. However, on landing, I managed to hit a small PVC safety pole with my right wing. … doing about 40mph. The fuselage was decimated, but the wing was just fine. I was freaking pissed. But whatever, Version 3 will be the best yet. You’d think I’d eventually figure out that this airplane and me just weren’t meant to be. Never! The Ironic part was two of the homies were there, and kept ribbing me how it’s built poorly, and will crash. I maintain that if you hit something after you land, it’s an accident, not a crash.

Anyhow, that sucked. Monday Burt Rutan and the guys won the X-Prize. They were the first private venture to get to space twice in one week, and they win 10 million dollars for doing so. I went out to a local airport with a bunch of guys to fly a model of the winning design. The model was realllllyyyyy cool, and it flew really well. While we were messing around, these guys were prepping a plane for it’s first test flight. One of the guys who was there was a professional airshow pilot, and would be doing the first flight. He’s also one of Scott’s really good friends. So he takes off and flies out of sight. Scott non-chalantly asks me if I want to go chase him. …I was like … YES. So we went flying in this small Cherokee airplane. I’d never been in a small plane before, and it was quite possibly the most eye opening experience of my life. I accidentally said something stupid about “Was that a negative G force I felt?” and Scott kind of goes… “No… Watch This…” He guns the engine up to full, pulls 30° up, then suddenly pushes the nose down. Their is something about being glued to your seat belts, with your butt off the seat, being pushed towards the ceiling of the airplane that is unnerving. I shouldn’t have said anything in retrospect. It really freaked me out. The upside was that I even got to take the sticks a little bit and fly the plane. I’m totally hooked. I’m coming home with a pilot’s license.

So yeah, Awesome weekend. I don’t think any weekend ever will top that. When I consider how I could have been getting drunk / getting over a hangover all weekend, and then I consider what I did this weekend, I think more and more that I’m making the right choice by not drinking.

Joshua Ziering

(Notice my mom drew the classic ‘circle with a line through it’ but chose not to draw the soldering iron) *snicker*

-Joshua Ziering

I woke up early today to do a computer job before I went to school. The guy I’m working for was all pissed off because I showed up at noon, but he never set a time with me. Just “I’ll see you in the A.M.” l’ll see you in the AM?! That’s crap. He left me a voice message threatening that if I didn’t come he would show up at my house. NOBODY threatens me. Nobody. It just doesn’t happen. I’m about to send him an e-mail ‘terminating’ our business relationship. Who would have thought the consultant could fire the big guy?

I’m all riled up over something, so stupid. I hate my school. I’m glad I’m leaving. I hate New Jersey, I’m glad I’m leaving. I hate right now, and their’s nothing I can do about it. I have nostalgia for a year ago.

-Josh Ziering