As a follow up on my previous article with the WRT320N, here’s my journey for the WRT610N revision 2 (which is very similar, but has two radio’s).

Continue reading ‘Converting a WRT610N to dd-wrt’ »

The Align manual doesn’t contain a list of spare part numbers. Luckily, the community took care of that (local copy of v1.7)

My first spool-up went rather well. The wind pushed over the rotor quite a bit, but I read that until the 3GX is actually airborn, it can’t compensate for anything. So I gave the throttle stick a push and indeed, the wind was compensated away. The controls were very sensitive; too sensitive for my taste; so I landed and increased the expo on the swash to 30% (it was 15%). During the next spoolup, there was a sudden “tick”, accompanied by a kick of the tail. Right after liftoff, the heli was pirouetting like crazy. Luckily I only was ~20cm high, so just dropping the pitch to -2º was enough to get it back on the ground without any damage.

I double-checked the gyro direction, the control direction and the direction of rotation; all seem to be correct. Until I took a closer look at the tail rotor itself:

The tail rotor hub had moved 6mm from the end of the shaft, and the set screw was gone. Moving the hub back into position was hard, it was jammed fairly hard.

After the build comes the setup. This post is mostly documentation for my own use.

Continue reading ‘Align T-rex 600E Pro setup’ »

After comparing half a dozen heli’s, and changing my mind every other day, I finally bought a replacement for my Raptor .50. The verdict became the Align T-rex 600E Pro. Since I was planning to use a Castle Creations ESC anyway, I went with the Super Combo.

Continue reading ‘Align T-rex 600E Pro build’ »

I briefly mentioned that the iMax B6 Quattro charger has a computer interface. I already was disappointed that the interface is per charger and only half of the chargers have it. Another disappointment came when I tried the software.

Continue reading ‘iMax B6 charger protocol reverse engineered’ »

I bought a new “multi-charger”, the iMax Quattro B6. Here is my review.

Continue reading ‘iMax Quattro B6 Charger’ »

I’m selling my Thunder Tiger Raptor 50 Titan:

This is a great helicopter for beginners. Its setup is very gentle and it can take some gusty winds. The governor allows you to concentrate on flying before having to fine-tune the engine. It’s also fast to refuel (in contrast with recharging a LiPo battery).

I’m selling it because my new club does not allow nitro.

I’m selling, preferably as a whole:

  • The helicopter itself, including manual
  • All servos (3x Futaba 3152, 1x 9206, 1x 9254)
  • OS 50SX-H Hyper motor (incl manual)
  • Gy401 tail gyro (incl manual)
  • GV-1 governor (incl manual)
  • Rx battery 3600mAh 4.8V, not new but still usable
  • battery-monitor: shows the charge-state of the Rx battery
  • NO receiver
  • fuelpump
  • Starter engine & pin
  • 4 liters of fuel
  • glow heater

In summary: everything you need to fly expect the transmitter, the receiver & a battery charger

I prefer you come and pick it up near Brussels, Belgium; that way I can show you it still flies.

If you are interested, feel free to propose a price.

After way to long, I finally found some time/weather combination to fly again. I’m a little embarrassed it took so long…

Of course, all my batteries were fairly dead. The glow heater was completely gone (0V), but was still usable after charging. My starter-battery was dead beyond repair. The LiPo’s of the miniTitan were is fairly good shape after more than a year in the fridge: 3/4th charged.

Before the flights, I upgrade my CastleLink software to version 3.40.0, and upgraded the ESC firmware to 3.27 along with these (PDF) new settings.
Continue reading ‘Flight log 2011-10-15’ »

As described before, I chose to use the mini-build of dd-wrt on my Linksys WRT320N. Since I wanted OpenVPN support, I needed to add it myself.

Installing

I again used the openwrt modules, openvpn has its own package. There are, however, several dependencies:

  • libssl.so.0.9.8 and libcrypto.so.0.9.8 from libopenssl
  • liblzo2.so.2.0.0 (and symlinks) from liblzo

I already had libcrypto installed, so I only needed 713kB of free space.

Configuring

Setup was fairly straightforward. Just make sure to do all heavy calculations on your desktop computer (i.e. generating keys). I installed the CA and host certificate into /jffs/etc/ssl, and added my openvpn-specific config files into /jffs/etc/openvpn. I did rewrite the verify-cn script from perl to bash, since dd-wrt doesn’t come with perl.

Next, I wrote a very simple wanup script to get openvpn (re)started at the appropriate time:

# openvpn.wanup
if [ -e /tmp/openvpn.pid ] ; then
    kill -HUP `cat /tmp/openvpn.pid`
else
    /jffs/sbin/openvpn --cd /jffs/etc/openvpn --config server.conf --daemon --log /tmp/openvpn.log --writepid /tmp/openvpn.pid
fi

Obviously: don’t forget to add the corresponding configuration to the firewall.