Beacon Astronomy Group presentation, 6th April 2024.
Speaker Ivana (Iv) Grozdanova, P.Hd student at University of Kent

Two flights with quadcopter "Tornado" at Walmer Beach, near Deal, Kent.
First flight with new SkyZone FPV goggles, very happy with those. Good solid video link and a nice clear image, and way more comfortable to wear than my old Eachine box goggle.
The on-screen display is a bit messed up in the goggles DVR footage but it was good enough to fly.
New quadcopter Zephyr had settings corruption and was unsafe to fly, so both flights were with Tornado (Diatone Roma F5). The GoPro keeps cutting out mid flight and I have no idea why!

My newly-built quadcopter, Zephyr, had its first real flights today. It's still a bit twitch because its not tuned and I haven't set any rates, just betaflight stock defaults.

The first video is with the FPV DVR showing telemetry. Its in ANGLE mode because my flight mode switch wasn't configured correctly..

Second flight I put on the GoPro and we are in full ACRO mode. Unfortunately the GoPro cut out mid flight, I have no idea why!!

|Zephyr was a budget build made entirely from parts purchased form SpeedyBee - I'm very pleased with the results so far!

The footage is raw from the camera/DVR and not stabilized. I've used whaite balance in DaVinci Resolve to give a neutral colour grade.

This is a re-upload of the video but this time with the full song lyrics, "Born a Rockstar" by NEFFEX.

The video was shot at Botany Bay on the Isle of Thanet, Kent early in the morning (about 7am).

I've used a very strong vivid colour grade to get that "rock star" look. The colours in the video are much more vivid than they were in real life. Amazing what you can do with a digital video editor these days!

Tim Improves Poetry, Episode 1: Robert Burns

Tim Improves Poetry, Episode 1: Robert Burns
Burns was a cheeky chappie, but last line rhymes was not his strong suit. Here's my alternative.

Blowing the cobwebs off the car and trying out my new GoPro HERO9

Printing a quadcopter mount

A video I started a couple of years back and never finished. It was meant to be a celebration of engineering and technology but I only gathered enough footage for the first minute or so, after which it just goes blank. I was reminded of this video by the just-released Veritaseum video about sewing machines. I've always been fascinated by sewing machines and in this video I got a nice close-up clip of the bobbin area. I thought I'd post this in its unfinished state just for that clip.

Video showing the issues I'm having with my closed loop stepper (for BTT tech support)

A neat trick using Fusion 360, using "parametric design" to make multiple designs just by changing a few settings.

A time lapse of a 3D print. THe item being printed is a bracket that will mount to the 4040 extrusion in the printer frame and serve as a camera boom, which will help to make better time lapses in future :)

Who knows what goes through the mind of a guinea pig? One moment you're nibbling some hay, then next minute, zoooooooom!

Documenting ongoing problems with the SBIG CCD camera at TAO.

New guinea pigs. 6 weeks old and still very timid. Coaxed out by food when they thought no-one was watching. Filmed under very poor lighting conditions, time lapse 2 frames per second

Don't get scammed. Some unscrupulous sellers on eBay are selling counterfeit batteries. The fakes are pretty convincing but easy to spot if you know what to look for. Here's how.

We are lucky to have our observatory in the heart of a lovely little nature reserve on the Isle of Thanet, Kent UK. Thanet is technically an island but not really and incorporates Margate, Ramsgate and Broadstairs. The nature reserve is dressed in the browns and reds of autumn at the moment and is looking very photogenic, so I thought I'd take a short walk and show you around before talking about the EQDrive system that we've installed on the telescope in Thanet Observatory. This is where we hold our public observing sessions every month with Monkton Stargazers.

A graphic visualization of the commit history of the ASCOM Platform. This is a project I've been involved with on and off for more than a decade.

ASCOM began it's journey towards becoming open source in 2009 and the initial burst of activity is the import of the version 5 code base into (then) Subversion. This was a pre-GitHub era and there was an everything-in-one-big-heap mentality. We had 3rd party drivers and all sorts of stuff in there. As version control in the cloud became more common these were phased out. Driver developers we encouraged to migrate code over to their own repositories and you can see large areas of code disappearing.

Some time around April 2018 the repository was migrated from Subversion to Git and hosted on GitHub. You can see some of the committer username change at this date.

Music from https://filmmusic.io
"What Is Love" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

What's happening at the observatory (live)?

A library of free, open source annunciators and indicators for use in applications that need to display status and alerts. These are the same controls that are in the ASCOM Platform, but updated and with a few bug fixes and re-published as a NuGet package, TA.WinForms.Controls. Sorry for the noisy audio, I've filtered it out as best I could.

Nuget: https://www.nuget.org/packages/TA.WinForms.Controls/
Source code and documentation: https://github.com/Tigra-Astronomy/TA.WinForms.Controls

The distinction between Windows and Linux is getting quite blurry. In this video I take a look at the Windows Subsystem for Linux plus some preview technologies including: Windows Terminal, a new terminal host; Powershell Core, the new cross-platform command prompt for Windows; and Edge Insider, the new web browser based on the Chrome rendering engine.

What's happening at the observatory (live)?

What's happening at the observatory (live)?

What's happening at the observatory (live)?

The quick and easy way to debug your ASCOM LocalServer project. Don't over-think it!