QuadCopter with Win8 Flight Console Talk

On August 27, 2013, I presented NiVek QC with a Windows 8 Flight Console to the Tampa Bay Robotics and Microcontroller Group.

As promised here are the materials and links.

Mounts were 3D Printed with my Afinia H-Series 3D Printer, but the Arms where from this FlameWheel kit.

Although the Windows 8 Console was built with Visual Studio .NET premium, Windows 8 Apps can be built with VS Express editions that can be downloaded for free.

The .NET equivalent to the Arudino, programmable in C# is the Netduino, they are pretty cheap and easy to get started with.  If you’re a .NET programmer and want to get started playing with hardware, this is a great place to start!

A great source of information and forums is located at the DIY Drones web site.  In addition parts and supplies can be purchased from the 3D Robotics store, I generally get most of my parts from Hobby King (they have a USA warehouse, otherwise shipping from Hong Kong is a week or two.

Finally if you don’t want to start from scratch and spend countless hours and probably thousands of dollars on parts, there are some off the shelf quad copters I can recommend.  The AR Drone 2 is a lot more than I had expected, it’s actually some very serious hardware.  You need to get some additional parts like Motors, ECS’s and a frame, but for a flight controller, you can pickup an Ardupilot APM for relatively cheap.  The firmware can be customized relatively easy.

Hope this gets you going and be sure to let me know if you get something up in the air (or have some awesome crashes in the process).

-twb

WACOM Bamboo Tablet/64bit OS/Silverlight & One-Note Conflict

I haven’t quite figured out the relationship yet, but if you are working on a 64 bit OS and are using a WACOM Bamboo tablet, then try to open a page that uses Silverlight or try to use a pen within One-Note, your mouse will freeze up.  If you logoff and log back in the problem goes away (you don’t have to reboot your machine)

Very odd.

Luckily the solution is fairly trivial.

Look for the file:

WISPTIS.EXE in the directory C:\Windows\SysWOW64

And just rename it (you could probable just delete it but I hate throwing anything away)

Once you do that, you will be able to use your kewl little tablet with your 64 bit OS without issue.

I have noticed that sometimes when I reboot, some lovely maintenance feature decides to help me and restore the missing file.  I just haven’t gotten around to writing some startup script to automate this yet.

UPDATED: 5/20/2009 8AM EST – It seems as though when I launch One-Note and a page contains a Visio diagram, a windows comes up saying “Reinstalling One-Note” at that point the very bad WISPTIS.EXE file re-appears.  This is obviously a big problem.  I’ll post more once I get a little more information.

UPDATED: 5/29/2009 8AM EST – Trying a new solution, compiled a simple Console App with the name WISPTIS.exe and put it in the C:\Windows\SysWOW64 directory, my hopes being I can fool whatever thinks this file needs to be there, that it is already there and not copy the one that screws up my system.  So far, I can pretty much do everything without the original file.  I’ll post if I find out differently.  Drop me an email if you want a copy of this file, or better yet, just create a small console app that does nothing.

UPDATED: 5/29/2009 8:01AM EST – Just tried opening a Silverlight page, it did finally open, but the browser froze up for about 30 seconds.  Since as of today (5/29/2009), I’m about 80% convinced that Windows 7 RC is good enough for my main dev box, I think my next step is just repave my machine with that.  Stay tuned, I’m not convinced that will resolve the issue, but I’ll let you know.

-ec