My Obsession with Flight

I've always been fascinated by flight. One of my first books ever was a picture book of the Mirage series of fighters by Dassault. The first things I built with Lego blocks were machines and aircraft and my first science experiments were on airfoils. I tried building powered aircraft for several years in my early childhood but never succeeded. When I was 10, my uncle bought me a Guillow's rubber band powered model of the T-6 Trojan. I began playing with flight simulators when I was 9, my first sim being Microsoft FS 98. Over the next decade and half I ended up spending countless hours immersed in virtual flight on FS 98, FS 2000, FS 2002 and FS X.

AH-64A Apache, US Army

A-10A Warthog, USAF

The next three years were spent fiddling around with my own designs using balsa wood sheets. I experimented with vertical take- off designs, tailless deltas, forward swept wings, canards, glider-like configurations, swept wings with various degrees of sweep, etc . Later, I built a Messerschmitt Bf-109 with a kit, which eventually disappeared with time. Then entered the mammoth B-17 project . It had thousands of parts and was never completed . A four engined bomber was just too much!

MiG-21M, Indian Airforce

MiG-29A, Indian Airforce

CVN-70 USS Carl Vinson
aircraft carrier, US Navy

Then entered a phase of kit-building. I was building Academy scale display models, Guillow's powered models, Megatech's R/C choppers and my own DIY designs. One of the Megatech choppers crashed from three storeys and disintegrated. I began loving the scale and detail of the Academy models, eventually building five of them. They were the Soviet Sukhoi Su-27UB Flanker, Indian MiG-29A and MiG-21M, A-10A Warthog of the USAF and the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier. They took the punishment of time but were finally repaired to the original state. Other static models in the collection included a Russian Ka-52 Alligator, Chinese MiG-17 and an AH-64A Apache.

Cessna 170

P-51D Mustang, USAAF

P-40 Warhawk, US Navy

A6M Zero,
Imperial Japanese Navy

The powered aircraft fleet consisted primarily of Guillow's models. German Bf-109G, Japanese A6M Zero, Canadian DHC-1 Chipmunk, Cessna 170, P-40 of the US Navy, P-51D Mustang of the USAAF and a Guillow's own  1960s design, the Lancer. The static models from Guillow's consisted of the F-16 and the F-14. The F-16 bore some damage with time. The Zero and P-40 have torn tissues and the Bf-109 was completely lost . The DHC-1 had been gifted to a friend about 4 years ago. The main star of my fleet was (and still is) the Megatech Housefly II. It was one of the first models featuring a coaxial counter-rotating rotor system and was thus capable of indoor flight. This was the state-of-the-art in 2006. Flying this was a charm at Indira park in those days. It was even capable of table-top operations. 

F-14A, US Navy

The photo collection

Its not just modelling that interested me. I was a keen collector of aircraft photos. I personally shot almost every aircraft in IAF inventory; Su-30, the MiG series, Hawk, An-32, Il-76, Suryakiran team, Chetaks and Mi-17s, Dorniers, Maruts, Hunters and Seakings. My collection also included every aircraft in the Boeing and Airbus line and from every major airline; Air India, Thai, Singapore, United, Emirates, Air Canada  to name a few. Being a biker at IISc helped me this way and I often ride up to the runway of the Yelahanka airforce base to shoot the landing Dorniers, Ilyushins and Avros. Transport aircraft of German, Soviet and British origins operating in the same base!

Antonov An-32, Indian Airforce. Shot moments from take off at Yelahanka.

At the helm of a chopper

Megatech

I've always resisted being an aerospace engineer, preferring to study my own designs at my own pace and for its own sake. I'd prefer to be a hobbyist, rather than a professional when it comes to aviation. Perhaps thats one of the charms of flight. Its captivating and truly inspirational in its own way, exerting its undulating influence on many a creative mind. And this might be the reason why most pioneers of aviation were hobbyists to start with. 

Chevalier XIX - The Bike Headlight

So I'm still continuing to name my DIY stuff as Chevalier. The previous Chevalier was an autonomous feeder for my fish tank. The story of my lights is far fetched. When I came to know that I'd soon be riding in the dark, I went to Pedals n Wheels and bought myself a Sigma Illux safety light. I had no clue about what a safety light was. When it proved to be of no use, I bought two cheap BSA headlights, which hardly lasted 3 hours. I got marooned on a night ride on Tumkur road with them.

Since then, I was on a lookout for lights. My crash in october kept me out of action long enough that I founded a Robotics Club in IISc and restarted my erstwhile hobby. Purchasing a headlight worth thousands of rupees is simply preposterous now! This link by Gokul reminded me that a headlight was pending. His was a more temporary-style setup and without any weatherproofing or any solid clamp to his bike.

I began by asking him a demo of his light, which he gladly gave. He filed off the lens to fit a square aluminum tube, which created an amoeba-shaped light beam. Also, I didn't want any focussed light beam. I just want light. Lots of it. It should all be lit. The ground, the trees, everything! And it should hurt motorists the way their high beams hurt us! I'm ready to compensate for the energy consumption with D cells.

Gokul said he used a 555-based timer for doing pulse width modulation to control the current in the circuit. This has a fundamental flaw: versatility. The astable multivibrator made with a 555 can generate only a limited range of duty cycles and frequencies using a single potentiometer. And the number of modes he can have in his light is very limited. And if he desires something extra, he needs to add circuitry. I got a normal 1/4 watt LED working with a 555 based oscillator but soon abandoned the scheme.

I substituted all this circuitry with a time-tested and reliable companion: Arduino UNO. It's already a part of my bike and I had already made a weatherproof mount for it on my handlebar. So I hooked up a pin of the Arduino to a driver IC and connected the driver to the 3 watt LED. It consumed about 70 milli amps at around 30% duty cycle and about 300 milli amps at around 80% duty cycle.

I mounted the LED onto a heatsink and fixed it to a circular lens. The result: A bright light that scatters everywhere. Just the way I wanted it! I drilled a nice circular hole in the cap of an old film cannister using the dremel and fixed the lens to it with Araldite. The battery holder could not be fixed anywhere. A screw through it was dislodging the batteries. So I wrapped it in bubblewrap and put it in the Arduino box. Neither is it fixed, nor is it movable!

Final step: weatherproofing. I poured generous amounts of hot glue on every hole that exists. As a final check, I immersed my light into my fish tank.

The blinding 3 watt LED!

Let there be light! Lighting up the S-Block hostel

Up close and personal!

The beamshot. The distance between two consecutive white blobs is 2 meters.

Apache Cordova 3.0, Mac OS X and iOS Development: Part I - Installation

I've been interested in developing for iOS for quite some time, but the necessity to learn Objective C has postponed by efforts till now. A while back, Ramnath from our IISc Robotics Club mentioned about PhoneGap and the possibility to develop iOS and Android apps using nothing more than HTML/CSS and Javascript. My journey into mobile development begins here.

As a follower of the Apple-cult, I wanted to begin with iOS development and decided to install Apache Cordova/PhoneGap on my MacBook Air.

I used XCode 4.7 on Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion and Cordova 3.0.0. The new rules set by Apple in May 2013 require apps to support iPhone 5 and retina displays. This means, anything created with versions prior to Cordova 2.5.0 would not be published to the App Store. I encountered several issues with this and finally was able to get it working. The following steps worked well for me. Please feel free to contact me for comments or clarifications.

Step 1: Install XCode from the App Store or from the Apple Developer Portals.

Step 2: Make sure that the Locations tab in XCode Preferences looks like this:

Step 3: Launch Terminal.app and enter the following to create a new app called HelloWorld. This is created in the folder iOSApps.

Step 4: Use XCode to open the .xcodeproj file from the directory that was created when the previous step was executed.

Step 5: After it opens with XCode, add $(OBJROOT)/UninstalledProducts/include  to Build Settings -> Header Search Paths in the Target. Choose the iPhone simulator and click on 'Run' at the top left corner to build and launch the simulator.

Step 6: If everything has gone well till now, the iPhone simulator launches with the sample app. 

References:

I found the following resources to be the most helpful.

1. Apache's documentation - The standard resource!

2. Ranjeet's blog - Though it's for Cordova 1.7 and is no longer completely valid, it provided clear insights.

3. Stackoverflow - 1, Stackoverflow - 2, Stackoverflow - 3 - Addresses a problem that I faced

4. PhoneGap Docs - Valuable info!

5. Wikipedia - The source of all human knowledge :P