In other Christmas news

[simont]

Christmas seemed to go off reasonably well. Went down to Dad's for a few days, and Sophie (sister) and Tim (her boyfriend) were there too, at least until they got up at good grief o'clock yesterday morning to go and catch a plane to a ski resort. So, plentiful alcohol, plentiful nice food, a couple of walks (one in the general vicinity of Watership Down, which surprised me a little since it had never occurred to me to even wonder if it might be a real place), and a few days away from home.

Unfortunately my before-leaving-the-house checklist included ‘lock the door’ but failed to include ‘do that little mental dance to make sure I can remember having locked the door’; so the holiday was slightly marred by me occasionally worrying that I might have left it open. Though, of course, when I got home I found it was perfectly all right and I'd been worrying for nothing.

Highlight of the entire trip, I think, would have to have been one of Tim's Christmas presents from his family (he brought quite a few of those and we all watched him open them :-). He got a Picoo Z indoor RC helicopter, which is a beautifully simple and robust little device. Curiously, the single most difficult thing to get it to do appears to be to make it fly forwards: it has a control for main rotor speed and one for the tail rotor, so it's easy to get it to go up and down and change its heading, but there's no control to tilt it forwards, so getting it to actually follow that heading takes skill, patience and deviousness. Still, it afforded us quite a lot of fun on Christmas Day trying to get it to fly; by the end of the day Tim seemed to be basically able to coax it gradually in a specified direction, in spite of Sophie's best efforts to shoot it down with a party popper :-)

Comments

[oneplusme.livejournal.com]

Watership Down is very definitely real. I've been running up and down it on occasion, and my legs would like to point out that it is not only real but very steep indeed. Pretty, though.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Helicopter - if you weight the front slightly with blu-tak or gaffer tape you might have more success, but they are flighty little beasts doomed to whizz round crazily. You can now buy competitive ones which fire lazers and can shoot each other out of the sky!

Watership Down - the first copy of the book I had had a big OS type map in the cover of Watership Down and all the places around it, so I never doubted it was real.

[simont]

It actually came with little sticky weights you could attach to the nose, and we did try them; but the trouble with them is that (a) the clever auto-stabilising mechanism helpfully compensated for them to a large extent, and (b) they add to the total mass of the thing, which you don't want because it takes more energy to keep it in the air and drains the battery faster.

A better solution seemed to be to fiddle with the tail fin so that it deflects the blast from the tail rotor downwards, hence pushing the tail up and the nose down.

Additionally, the docs reckon you get a bit of forward thrust when you turn it in the direction requiring more tail-rotor power, presumably because the deflected blast as per the previous paragraph is greater, so the tail tips up more. So they recommend driving it in long curves. Sneaky.

(I suppose, though, that it really would have been too mechanically difficult to put a cyclic control on the thing. To say nothing of the increased pilot skill required.)

[pm215]

In addition to mechanical difficulties, the other traditional limit has been number of radio channels, I think [although I see that Wikipedia says this one is infrared anyway]. (It occurs to me that you ought these days to be able to digitally stuff multiple inputs down one channel rather than needing a channel per analogue input -- does anybody do that?)

[gerald_duck]

Two of my cousin's children got those helicopters for Christmas. One snapped a top rotor within the day, and the repair messed up the mass of both rotor and entire helicopter — they'll probably take it back for a replacement, but the things aren't necessarily quite as robust as they seem.

Still huge fun, though.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:) I think the preface said the geography in the book was true all the way through, but the people (and the talking rabbits) were made up.