PACTF is live! We bring yet another year of great CTF problems and prizes — over $20K this year. Sign up now at https://2018.pactf.com/register/ for a chance at winning a lifetime-free proton mail account that quite literally cannot be bought anywhere else!

I conducted a successful radio and IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) test today! The drone, with IMU onboard, broadcasted a live stream of data over radio to a controller board which then streamed the data to my mac over serial. No cable connected the drone and computer!

IMU (On drone) → Radio Broadcaster (On drone) → Radio receiver (On separate board) → Computer (Over serial)

Since all parts were so low level, it had very low latency. Even though I enabled a gaussian filter over time and had built in delays to allow from interrupt signals. Such a low latency might make it possible to do off-board computation on live flights, which would make reinforcement learning (or other on-the-fly learning methods) possible!

PACTF (Phillips Academy Capture the Flag) is back again for another year! We've worked hard on the prizes and problems this year, so get excited. Early sign ups are available here.

Woo Hoo!

The drone project is revitalized! Andover has decided to approve and fund the project for this term. I've designed and made the new drone. Its goal was to be easily fixable upon crashing (which it'll doubtlessly do), so it is held together by common 5/40 screws. All parts, except motors and controllers, are either 3d printable or laser cuttable. Schematics and motor tests are on my GitHub (https://github.com/Reichenbachian/) here. Expect much more fun to come!