NZ Electronics Recycling Tax

What is the story with this electronics recycling. Is there any value in the recycled materials? Is someone clipping the ticket at both ends? ie. you pay to have it recycled and they get paid for the materials? I see that the NZ Government is considering another tax on electronics […]


Radxa Rock development board

Radxa Rock development board

Quad Core 1.6GHz ARM RK3188 A nice board, supplied with Android and the Linaro Linux distro installed. I chose this board because I wanted good performance, low power and LInux. I got a couple from SeeedStudio. Out of the box it boots Android. One of the apps is a boot […]


Brushless Gimbal Controllers

What’s the Story I have just started looking into how this all fits together. There are many different gimbals and controllers available. But how does it fit together, which firmware works with my chosen gimbal controller. I recently ordered this Gimbal and this Controller – old links removed. At this […]

Brushless gimbal kit

NZ Post international-air label

New Zealand Post

I’m not really surprised I just sent a envelope Air-Post to France, containing a tiny circuit board. It was just thick enough that it wouldn’t go through the letter guide, due to a bit of bubble wrap inside. I sent a $9 item weighting a few grams, charged $10 shipping […]


ESC Testing with SimonK Firmware

Two ESCs Fail I’ve had two ESCs fail in one day, one in a zero-throttle fast descent and one while bench testing with no props and running off a 5A current-limited bench power supply. Both play the little tune through the motor when powered on but ignore PPM input and […]

ESC testing

futaba 40MHz test

Futaba 40MHz Transmitter Repair

The Fault No transmission – pretty simple really. Testing and Repair Turning it on and all seemed OK. The small radio scanner showed that there was no signal transmitted; at least not in the 40MHz band. Maybe the crystal or part of the transmitter circuit had failed. Next, open it […]


Switching Battery Eliminator Circuit – S-BEC

A Typical RC S-BEC I bought a couple of these S-BECs with the intention of installing one in a FPV wing. Before doing this I needed to know what it was capable of. This module is from Hobbyking and is rated to 26 Volts input and 5 Amps continuous output, […]


phone charger

Portable cell phone power supply from LiPo battery

My Android phone battery only lasts a few hours when using the GPS to record tracking while hiking around the hills. So I was looking for a quick, cheap, simple and not too heavy solution. This took about an hour to assemble and test from parts I had in the […]