Studio711.com – Ben Martens

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Featured Photo

There is a relatively new (at least to me) website called dailyhiker.com that I’ve been following. The guys who run it are local to the Pacific Northwest but the blog covers hiking around the world. They ran a contest recently for the best lake photo so I submitted my photo of MattM skipping rocks into the Puget Sound (technically not a lake I guess) on last summer’s camping trip. I didn’t win but I did make it into the top 13. Interestingly it’s the only photo in that group that has a person in it. This photo was taken with our little point and shoot. I’m really looking forward to hiking around with the T2i this summer.

http://www.dailyhiker.com/news/best-lake-photos-from-readers/

benmartens March 17, 2011 Links, Outdoors

What’s Our Vector Victor?

During my brief stint with Lockheed in Minneapolis, I contributed a bit of code to an after-hours UAV project. Unfortunately I didn't get involved until almost the end of my time up there, but I was enthralled with the project. Since then I've always had an idea in the back of my mind to buy an off-the-shelf RC plane and add an autopilot to it.

The project either boils down to a ton of time or a ton of money. That might be changing though. Some clever individual has created a simple autopilot with pieces from the Lego Mindstorms kit. The kit now includes a gyro sensor and that is the piece that enabled this project. Currently the autopilot will maintain level flight and control the rudder to return the plane to the launch area.

If you see a tiny plane flying overhead taking pictures of you, look for the Studio711 logo on it. I'd love to create my own version of this project.

[source via slashdot]

benmartens March 16, 2007 Links, Projects

A Few of My Favorite Things

Xbox, Microsoft, and motorcycles. Oh my! Looks like the good people of the Xbox team are doing a motorcycle ride for charity. I wonder how long it would take me to ride to Redmond to join up with them. I was thinking we should start up something like this at Lockheed. I know a lot of people ride, and I bet we could get a fairly good sized group together.

Speaking of motorcycles, I had the first warm ride of the spring yesterday and I'm looking forward to a lot more of it today and tomorrow. I own an extra helmet now so if any of you lovely ladies would like a ride, just let me know.

benmartens March 10, 2006 Links, Motorcycle