Something Unreal

My brother’s new engine being controlled from a laptop. He made a little makeshift frame for the engine, the starter’s battery and the microcontroller. There is a program he made in VB6 on the laptop, which sends commands to the microcontroller via a serial cable, which controls a Futaba servo, which moves the throttle on the engine via a paperclip, which spins the propellor and spinner up to 17,000 RPM.

We’re just messing around here. =D

He intends to buy a plane chassis and RF transmitter/receiver to make a full remote-control plane in the near future – as soon as he has the money.

I apologize for the low video quality – I was recording with my PSP, and had to reduce the video quality because the memory stick was almost full. The video still ended due to it running out of space, though.

The engine is a Thunder Tiger GP42.
The microcontroller is an SSC-32 made by LynxMotion (yep, we use these in so many things).

…And to anyone who’s seen our “singing motor” videos – well, I’d love to do it, but he won’t let me. -_-

Here’s my brother (“Steeeven1″ on YouTube, at far left on vid) playing 3 songs with his band at a gig which was held yesterday in Hemel Hempstead (in Hertfordshire, England). I was only told the spelling of the band name the morning after I made and uploaded the video. -_-’

Songs (already mentioned in the vid, but oh well):
“Warriors of the World” by Manowar
“Phantom” by Phantom
“Paranoid” by Black Sabbath

You don’t need to tell me that the feedback is nasty – it’s not their fault either. The sound assistant got it right in the sound checks, but for some reason felt the need to fiddle during the actual performance.

Oh, my camera skills are non-existant too.

Oh look, YouTube converted it to mono. Why am I not surprised? High-quality stereo MP3s of Phantom playing these songs:

- Warriors of the World

- Phantom

- Paranoid

What can I say? I was bored. For some reason, my brother got hold of 2 fire bells, and decided to connect them to his usual 2 boards to allow them to be controlled by a program on a computer. Well, in this video, not much complex happens. After I recorded this, I made the program make the bells chime on the hour the appropriate number of times, according to what hour it is. I might upload that another time.