Power supply replacement – Smart House – Kristil 1

After 10 or more years of operation there are probably many Smart House or Kristil home automation systems that are beginning to act up. One cause can be ageing power supplies.  The older power supplies, some linear and some switch-mode have been operating 24/7 and may have been running warm. […]

replacement power supply

ESC with improved heatsinking

Standard ESC-BEC rating and heatsink

I decided that the ESC-BEC caused a problem in my 2M Elegance glider and had to do something about it. A minor crash due to the BEC getting hot and shutting off. The BEC powers a 8-channel 2.4G receiver, 4 small E-Sky digital servos and a couple of LEDs on […]


2M Elegance glider minor crash

It was a nice early evening at the flying field. Not too much wind and a bit of lift early on. I was moving the sticks and it just did its own thing. I was stupid enough to do it twice; just to prove there was a problem; yep, confirmed. […]

ESC mounted

Raspberry-Pi for media and web browsing

I recently had another look at using the Raspberry-Pi as a media player with the idea of reducing power draw for general media, web browsing and email. In the past I’ve used XBMC on a modded X-Box. For the last couple of years I’ve used a full-blown PC running KUbuntu […]


Raspberry-Pi power mod and case 4

I’ve just received a R-Pi from Element-14. They said it would be mid Jan but it arrived late Dec. As with the others I’ve done, I decided to attach a 5V power lead and larger capacitor. See the previous posts. The case is from Soanar; possibly also available from Jaycar. […]

Raspberry Pi capacitor and cpuheatsink added

Mele vs Raspbmc and a TV

Initial Impressions After seeing the Mele in operation, yesterday I installed Raspbmc on the Raspberry Pi (R-Pi) to see how it compared. No problems during install but it won’t work with the hdmi on our TV. I could probably edit a file to force it to use hdmi; but this […]


2.4GHz vs Long Wire RC control

A 40MHz control problem recently got me thinking again about lower frequency vs 2.4GHz control. I’m still using 35MHz as are a few others locally, as well as 40MHz and 72MHz. Local Testing I live about 2KM from the flying field so I can listen or test for radio activity […]


Reinstalled and reay to go.

Server CPU heat and shutdown

Solved Recently I transferred the blog to a faster machine. A AMD dual-core system that I’ve had for a few years. This significantly improved the page load times. On the bench for a couple of weeks it worked fine; out in the open with little load. Once in service and […]