After the build comes the setup. This post is mostly documentation for my own use.
Author Archive
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 500E Pro. Since I was planning to use a Castle Creations ESC anyway, I went with the Super Combo.

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.

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.
As mentioned before, when switching to IPv6 (or more realistically, to dual stack) one of the things that might not work out of the box is VPNs. I decided to put some effort in it to get it to work anyway.
Together with most of the internet, we tested IPv6 on World IPv6 day last week. I won’t go into details on what IPv6 is and why it’s important. Although IPv6 has been tested intensely in isolated networks, this is the first time it was tested on such a large scale. Technically, the participants would just add AAAA-records for their websites to DNS. This small change causes a huge effect. Since most browsers are configured to prefer IPv6 AAAA-records over IPv4 A-records, this causes all IPv6-connected users to suddenly connect over IPv6 instead of IPv4.
For the most part, this major changeover happened without as much of a hitch. In fact, if I hadn’t known it was World IPv6 day, I wouldn’t have noticed anything. But I’m not a normal web-user, so I did notice some issues.
Continue reading ‘World IPv6 day – lessons learned’ »
I was under the illusion that a Time Machine backup would do as they claim:
You can set up Time Machine to automatically back up all your important files, including your documents, music, photos, applications, and any other items you keep on your hard disk.
I consider my iTunes authorizations important, but apparently Apple does not. Seems that these are specifically excluded from backups… Removing the “SC Info” line from the /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist file solved this.
I know I should have de-authorized my machine before reinstalling, and I know you can “de-authorize all” to fix this as well; but it’s pretty disturbing to see iTunes remove all your applications from your iPhone…
