Introducing VETuner Ever since I put a Megasquirt MS1 into the Stupid Car, back in 2009, I’ve been fiddling with software to work with it and similar ECUs. It started with MSLogger, and Android app that only logged and didn’t provide any capability to adjust the ECU. Then I joined the effort working on MSDroid which was much more capable. Fast forward many years and MSDroid is effectively dead. I still fiddle with the code, but I can’t publish any updates to Google Play as it is tied into an obsolete payments library and that side of it belongs to the project owner.
I thought I’d have a play with Copilot to see what it could do as I maintain this blog using VSCode as it is significantly better than both emacs & vi1. I thought a nice simple task would be to add OpenGraph tags the the head of each most. It was more painful than I thought. TL;DR It finally got it right, but it didn’t notice it wasn’t reading the output of it’s own test tools and it happily made assumptions without testing them.
The Stupid Car failed it’s MOT on knackered bushes in the shocks and the Panhard rod. I knew this day was coming as they looked pretty ropy last year when I took this photo This is not something I’d ever done before, so new stuff to learn and maybe an excuse for new tools! First port of call was the Spax website to see if they had suitable bushes. TL;DR was “We don’t support old shocks, want to buy some new ones?
My plane currently weighs 235g (minus a few grammes of control surface connections), but it has a weight problem. I used FreeCAD to design and print a simple balance frame. (I should have put a nice chamfer on the joints) I then removed the battery (27g 600mAh 2S LiPo) and put some scales under the tail. They read 25g. In order to get the plane to balance, I’d need to place the battery somewhere about 300mm in front of the centre of gravity.
It’s A Plane When I was a teenager, I used to belong to the Chester Model Flying Club (which now appears to be defunct :( ) and I flew electric powered gliders of about 2M wingspan. Typically a balsa framework, with a 540 motor and a 6 cell NiCad battery. Power (& skill) were marginal, weight was high, but I had fun. I’ve always hankered getting back into it, partly becuase my route to and from work can go via the Nomansland Common where there are facilities to fly planes.