Alioth's Journal: A milestone

I have gone a whole week without having a pilot induced crash with my RC helicopter. A new record! I did have a couple of minor scrapes when the tail rotor came disengaged, but managed to cut the power and the heli, by fortune, ended up in a forsythia bush (flinging leaves and twigs out as the main rotor sliced through the foliage). I nearly had a really big crash tonight though - I took it outside in very gusty conditions to see if I could handle 25mph+ gusts, and found that I couldn't! I got caught in a really squirrely one that nearly had the heli into the wall of the house, and did a semi-aerobatic manoevre to avoid the crash - I think it must have been 60 degrees nose up in my effort to not pile nose first into the wall, with full collective. All I could see was the planform of the heli pointing at the sky. Somehow, I managed to return it to terra firma after wrestling it to the ground (and pruning a small tree). I decided that hovering indoors was a better plan. By contrast, I did OK in the 15 mph gusts this morning, only one or two scary moments!

On the Spectrum ethernet front, I've been doing a little bit here and there, mainly squishing bugs in the socket library (written in assembler, and stored on the board's ROM) and getting the C library to work; so far I've got a simple TCP client and server (and a multiplexed one that handles up to 4 simultaneous connections. On a ZX Spectrum!) I still want to change the CPLD configuration though, I've given it some thought and I think my current design is a bit crap in places. But that's the great thing about using a CPLD rather than a number of 74-series discrete logic ICs - I can change the logic with a JTAG cable, rather than having to change the PCB layout.