Let’s face it.  I’m a handyman nub.  I’ve got a reasonably functional brain, and I’m technically minded, but I haven’t done any real woodworking since high school (I did Tech Studies in years 8, 9, and 10, both woodworking and metalworking).  So it’s fair to say I’m pretty bad.

While I was poking around about what kinds of cool things people do with an Arduino, I stumbled across AeroQuad.  It’s a site and community for folks who are developing an open-source multi-rotor RC helicoptor.

Rewind 25 years or so.  I’ve always had an interest in electronics.  Mostly in pulling stuff apart and tinkering with it - I even built a few little FM radio transmitters in my early teens.  Of course, then I discovered computers, and the hardware side of things took a pretty big back seat from then.  And when I discovered the Internet in 1992, that was the end of that.  For a while at least.

I’m employed as a server admin, with most of my time spent working with VMware and managing a reasonably sized fleet of machines.  As such, I have a range of various Powershell scripts I’ve written to take advantage of VMware’s PowerCLI interface for Powershell.  PowerCLI is, in a word, great.  It provides some pretty good in-depth insight to what’s going on in vCenter, and since it ties into Powershell, it’s easy to script up whatever you want to do.

So, I got hold of an i-Mate Smartflip smartphone for work, and wanted to configure it for ActiveSync over Bluetooth. I’ve got a Compaq nc8430 laptop. Here’s where the fun begins.