As part of the new set of quadcopter parts I’ve ordered, I received my 3DR Radio 915MHz kit yesterday.  This little beauty is about half the price of an equivalent XBee Pro, smaller and lighter, and also can inject signal strength data into the MAVlink telemetry packets.  It’s also very, very new.

I finally got an ATmega2560, and therefore went and updated my Bus Pirate extensions to support memory paging on it.  The fix wasn’t too extensive, just a matter of having some hardware on hand to test it.

As I believe I mentioned earlier, my Hobbyking HK-7x transmitter got fried pretty badly when I foolishly blew it up trying to recharge the batteries.  Anyway, I’ve swapped over to a Hobbyking HK-T6A transmitter, and frankly it’s pretty terrible.  There’s an incredible amount of jitter on the receiver outputs, bad enough that it affects my ability to fly the quad.  It also seems to drift out of calibration very quickly.  Quite disappointing, but I guess I can’t complain too much, it’s a very cheap Tx.

You may have noticed that zencoding.blogspot.com now redirects here, to coding.zencoffee.org .  I finally got around to buying up my own domain and setting up Google Apps for it so I can have all my own email addresses and DNS and stuff.

Lately I’ve been having an issue where MediaPortal playback is choppy and suffers from screen tearing.  It turns out this happens when the Windows 7 Aero theme gets turned off.  I’m not sure why it’s getting turned off sometimes, but at any rate you can force it on through the guide here;