Congrats to Bill for making it into the 2011 Catalog
hover1
Posts: 1,929
Congrats to Bill (wjsteele) for making it into the Parallax 2011 Catalog! Page 8. Full page.
http://www.parallax.com/tabid/611/Default.aspx
A great commercial project for the Propeller. Great Spin!
Much luck with it Bill!
Jim
PS I only need 2D on my hovercrafts. If I'm in 3D, theres something wrong.
http://www.parallax.com/tabid/611/Default.aspx
A great commercial project for the Propeller. Great Spin!
Much luck with it Bill!
Jim
PS I only need 2D on my hovercrafts. If I'm in 3D, theres something wrong.
Comments
Bill
There are great things happening for the prop commercially and Bill's is just one of them. We just need to find some more niches
Also, congratulations to all the others who have products in the Catalog!
It's great to be able to download the catalog - I find this much better than a printed one these days, even though it's not so convenient to read while watching TV - guess I need a kindle or iPad <hint> - unfortunately she that matters doesn't read this forum
Or having A LOT of fun!!! :-)
Bill
Semi Normal:
Not so Normal
Thanks Parallax!!! Keep up the great work!
Also, Merry Christmas all!
Bill
BTW. 250 sales at Oshkosh for a newly introduced product is huge!
@cluuso99
That wasn't me in those crafts. I tend to keep mine level.
@Toby
They were both Brits. Europe has a much more aggressive hovercraft racing community, and this is considered normal activity. We Americans have been trying hard, but I have to say, we have a way to go.
Jim
Cluso, I'm not sure if it's available in Oz just yet, but you might want to check out the B&N Nook Color. It uses a capacitive touch screen with a 7" IPS LCD so the image quality is on par with an iPad, and utilizes Android with a custom layer (It's also already been rooted, so this should unleash some more potential). It can also view PDFs as well as other types of document formats, and even browse the web over wifi (all of which it can do much better than the kindle). With an 800MHz OMAP processor, 512MB ram, 8GB flash, SD support and 8 hour battery life w/out wifi turned on, the ~250USD price seems very reasonable. I'm planning on picking one up soon, so I'll let you know how that goes if anyone is interested.
Bill, congrats on the inclusion of your product in the catalog. Here's to hoping 2011 brings too many products for Parallax to even list! (BTW, what plane is in your avatar?)
Thanks... I'm flying a P-51 Mustang in that shot! :-) If you look carefully, you can see the ground behind me because I'm (going verticle) in a loop!
Bill
Bill, are you a regular at Oskosh?? We may have crossed paths at one time or another. I worked for many years for a regular performer named Ken Brock of Gyrocopter fame (now deceased) and made the Oskosh and Lakeland airshows every year from California.
Mike B.
Yep, I go to Oshkosh and Sun-n-Fun every year. I also usually go to Sebring's Light Sport Expo in January as well. I never got a chance to meet Ken, but I do remember seeing him fly.
Bill
That's too cool! The helmet and the single/tandem seating arrangement was a good indication that you were strapped into something interesting.
Yep, we have to test our stuff to the extreme! :-) What better way?
Bill
Congrats on making it into the catalog. Looked into your product and it made me want to go out and buy another airplane just so I could have your HUD. :-). Seriously, it looks great, I would be curious about how how you project the HUD on the back side of the prop. I have shot more than a few approaches to minimums and that looks like it could remove some of the sweat factor.
Have a happy and successful new year.
RS_Jim
The system is actually simple theoretically, but was very hard to implement. Basically, the system tracks the propeller and adjusts a heavily modified raster display to match the rotating movement of the propeller. It uses a very fast laser scanner to "keep up" with the propeller blades and simply draws the image on each blade as it passes.
The raster that we use actually starts in the middle of the propeller hub and works it way out to the edge of each blade tip. If you plotted it out, it would look like a spirograph instead of the "Z" pattern of a standard raster.
We use two propeller chips to actually get that system to work. (Three if you count the one in the Wingman, which is where we get our information.) The first one is used to scan and map the propeller blades. It keeps track of the speed and direction as well as the pitch (rotation around the long axis) of the blades. We need this information to prevent the display from fluttering and to compensate for speed and pitch changes of the blades. The second prop is used to actually generate the image by firing the laser based on the rasterized image. We update the key parameters from Prop 1 each revolution of a blade. It gets real interesting when you have planes with 3 or 5 blades on the propeller since the system has to display the image equally on each blade. In some cases, a three bladed propeller will have one or two blades in view at any one time. We have a dual rasterizer for those scenerios. On a 5 blade propeller, we actually use an additional cog to track the third, but we change our pattern so that we draw on only two blades, but cycle through (kind of like interlaced images) all the blades at any single frame.
Bill
Thank you for your explanation of the propeller HUD. Interesting the ocmplexities involved when more than a minimal 2 blade propeller. Lots of Prop 1s busy at work.
Congratulations on making it into the catalog. Your project is definintely one that should be in there.
That's an impressive image! Back in WWII my dad had lots of training to work on aircraft and still remembers how to work on the engines in those planes. I still have some of the sample parts he had to make in clasee. It's nice that many of those old planes are still flying. A lot of them were just trashed. Sadly after the war my father watched several brand new ones be cut up for scrap and the engines sold off to the people building hydroplanes. Made hime sick to his stomack. He would have loved to buy one instead.
Robert
Second... for those that are interested, here are a few pictures of me flying the Mustang.
The second one is my favorite!
Bill
Not only is your Propeller faster than my Basic Stamp, your Mustang is faster than my little 152...