RC Play Day

Up early and it's nice and sunny outside, just not quite as warm as it looks to be, but nice none-the-less. So I figured I would get out and enjoy the weather by messing with a few RC toys while soaking up some much needed vitamin D while the gettin' was good.

Drone

First up was a couple flights with the drone, it was a little windy so it was getting thrown around quite a bit. Add that to my overly aggressive flying and yea, I crashed it a bunch. I will say one thing, the drones are friggin' tough as nails because I rammed the fence, the bushes, the trees and several other things only to need to reset it and take-off no problem immediately after.

Later this evening just before the sun was fully gone I decided that one more flight was in order. I went out back and there was almost zero wind and just enough sunlight to see the LED's on the quadcopter. The flight went by super fast, I did not crash even once and once I saw the low battery warning I brought it over close and landed it smoothly on the patio right next to where I was standing. Wow, what a difference just the slightest amount of wind makes for flying. Lesson learned and nice to end the day with a good flight.

Traxxas Summit

Since I was tired of waiting for batteries to charge on the AR.Drone, I decided to break out my Traxxas Summit again since I have not driven it for over 2 years or so. This was a good and bad decision all wrapped into one. It was cool to get the truck back out and drive it some more even though it was short lived. The second set of batteries would not charge and the charger continued to error out when trying to charge them. The first set ran but not for very long which leads me to believe that they were in bad shape because of not being cycled for so long.

Looking on-line I figured that I would be able to get a few more batteries, NiMh or NiCd type but that was not the case. They are around but a little hard to find because everyone has switched over to the Lipo batteries. The Lipo are great but they are super expensive to convert over to. For my set-up I would have to get a new charger, some charging bags, a new speed controller that has a low voltage shut-off on it and of course the batteries which can run into a $300 to $500 upgrade that I am not willing to do for something I just mess around with when the mood suits me.

Supercross Dallas

The supercross boys raced in Dallas this week but as of now I have not been able to watch the race yet. Yesterday when it aired / recorded something went wrong and it only recorded about 2 hours of it so I was not able to find out what all went down. I tried today to record it again but something was still haywire so the TiVo assumed we did not get the channel and so it did not record it. We called Charter Media and got it taken care of, well sorta because while on the phone the channel popped back on, figures it would work out that way, huh! Tomorrow the race is on for one last time, but on another channel so I am going to try and get it recorded one more time. It's been a pain in the ass trying to not see any of the results on-line or on TV, but so far so good. Heck even if I do I will still watch the race, I enjoy the action too much whether I know ahead who has won or not.

Enough

I think I will end it there, it's been a great day and I don't want to spend the end of it hanging out writing in my journal because the next thing I know the weekend will be over. Tomorrow Cicely and I are planning on going to go back to a local place that sells safes and check out a Fort Knox one that we are wanting to get. I will see how it goes and if we want to add it to our budget. I think it's a great investment for many reasons, but the shoe still has to fit financially.

Photo: My Traxxas Summit (w/cam) Climbing Rocks