MS Surface Pro 2

Yet another Toy

I recently bought a Surface Pro 2. I opted for the Pro version for the option to be able to run Windows apps. I bought it as a laptop replacement for my circa 2009 MacBook Pro. I plan to still use my MBP from time to time, but just not as my primary daily computer. I'm hoping it turns out to be a good companion to my Nokia Lumia 920.

I've had it for a week or so and here are my thoughts.

Things I like

Touchscreen quality: the screen seem durable and the picture quality is great.
Netflix App: well writhen app I work reliably and is fun to use
Pen: Cool additional feature
Battery life: not sure how long it lasts yet however it looks promising
Speakers: the stereo speakers are loud and Clear
kickstand: the two position Kickstand works like a charm
Xbox Music: Like Pandora but better you ca actually browse albums
Handwriting: Keyboard- used to write this blog post very intuitive gestures
Pen input to One Note: Makes note taking fast and easy
Split Screen: I was able to watch a movie and surf the web at the same time
Processing power: Everything runs fast with no stuttering
Login PIN: Just like IPad
Skydrive integration: skydive appears Just like local drive in most apps
USB3 port: open up man uses
Micro SD slot: The ability to expand local storage is a great feature as you might imagine
Arrow keys: on keyboard why did this take so long to be implemented on tablets
News App: beautifully written app
Metro interface: I can't go back to IPad after using this interface
200GB of Skydive: for 2 years free I'm not a huge fan of cloud storage, but free is free

 

 

 

Things I don't like

Automatic apostrophe: doesn't work well
Camera quality: both are crap
App support: small but growing app library. Also apps are pricey compared Apple apps 
Gets warm: Its kinds of expected considering the horsepower
Narrator: needs improvement be able to be easier to use
No office: Only one month free of the 365 variety
Power connector: I like the magnet, but its difficult to connect sometimes I might be due to the angle
No touch friendly Chrome: That is worth  using
Heavy: To be expected but still light enough to be very portable 
Touchscreen Calibration: to get it calibrated properly you need to run an extended type o calibration
No clock on the Metro: nuff said
Kindle compatibility: found out some of my books aren't compatible with Win8!

 

Arduino Fan Control Project

My RC buggy has a brushless LiPo system in it. It can get pretty hot when running bashing hard. The motor tops out at 190F and the battery should stay under 120F. The motor mount comes with 2 pre-drilled fan mounting places which is nice. However I didn't want to wire them in straight and have them run constantly because that would be inefficient and deplete the battery prematurely.

Charging the 6S battery pack on my HPI Vorza

So the solution (which also gives me another project) is to make a temperature control circuit for my Vorza. Having a background in electronics engineering this should be a fun and challenging project.

Here is the scope of the project:

• Temperature monitoring of the motor, battery, and inside the car body.
• Two high CFM fans. One mounted on the motor and one mounted on the car body. The fan on the car body will exhaust hot air created by the ESC and motor fans which gets trapped under the body.
• The fans will turn individually on when the motor and the interior of the RC body reach a TBD temp.
• The battery temp will be monitored and an alarm will sound with a specific series of beeps if it gets too close to over temp.
• The battery voltage will be monitored via the balance connector. A specific series of beeps will alert me of the charge level. 3 beeps for 75%, 2 beeps for 50$ 1 beep for 25%.
• There will be a 7 segment LED panel that will cycle through the temps and the battery voltage.

I plan to use an Arduino Mini Pro for the microprocessor, it's cheap and very small. It will fit into a socket on the circuit board so I can take it out easily for programming changes.

It has more I/O than the project requires, but like I said it's cheap (about $10). I'm designing a circuit board to mount the electronics necessary to switch the fans, measure the temps, and display the processed info. Here is what I have so far. It's a work in progress and I need to change out some of the components for SMD to make it more compact. 

Work In Progress

The circuit board hasn't had the traces routed yet, so disregard the rats nest of lines. I'm using Eagle CAD to design the circuit board. I'm using some fairly basic circuits. So far I have a voltage regulator circuit, 2 relay circuits to switch the fans and some sockets to plug the fans, TMP36 temp sensors and Arduino. 

I haven't figured out how to distribute the power yet. The sensors and Arduino are 5 volts, but the fans are 12 volts. If you have any experience with this please help me out with it.

I found some Sunon fans from Mouser that should be more than enough to keep the motor and interior cool.

The programming should be pretty straight forward, I already have the fan sensor/fan switching code written and working. The next trick is to add the beeps and LED panel code.  

HPI Vorza Update - Thoughts after some time behind the wheel

After having some time behind the wheel of my HPI Vorza Flux I have a few opinions. Some good, Some not so good. The only so far upgrades are 6S Turnigy, 19/46 gearing and a Spektrum DX3e Radio.

First off I think buying the Vorza was money well spent. It embodies my attitude engineered into a RC buggy. It's mean, fast, capable, engineered, durable, and a shit-ton of fun!

Having the D-8 genetics it has a lot of adjustments you would find in a racer. Being a tinkerer, I really like that. I like messing with different set ups that are true racing adjustments. Unlike most racers some key parts are beefed up, I assume to make it more durable, because after all it's considered a basher.

Being beefy also means being heavy. That translates into poorer than usual handling. I have tried many different setups using the stock suspension parts and although it goes like a stabbed rat, it still seems to have under and over steering issues. A lot of that I feel has to do with having lots of power and useless stock tires. I have completely trashed the stock tires and it's time to upgrade to a set of PL Badlands, which seem to be the ipso facto tire choice for the Vorza. I'm sure things will change drastically with a new set of tires.

My biggest complaint with the buggy is how sloppy the drivetrain, suspension, and steering is. I think it suffers from driving accuracy because of it. I'm not sure there is any way to fix these issues without spending lots of money on aftermarket parts. Upgrading the stock steering servo will likely go a long way to tighten up the steering slop.

All that said I love this buggy! I don't plan to race it, I only plan to make it the meanest, fastest, best tuned basher I can. Other than tires and more batteries, I think I'll leave it the way it is and save my money for a racer. I like the new TLR 22-4.

I wouldn't hesitate to buy it again if I had to do it all over. If you are considering getting one, check out all the YouTube videos and decide if it looks like something you would buy. The only advice I have is to buy some replacement parts right away. Drive shafts and suspension parts tend to parish under 6S power. Also a 6S pack tends to make the car heavy on the left side. So maybe do a 4 or 5 cell just to keep the weight even. That might balance the performance slightly.

HPI Vorza First Few Runs

Holy crap this thing is fasssst! Point of reference, I haven't had a fast RC before, only rock crawlers.

My first run was on a 6S Nano-Tech battery and stock gears. It was very twitchy and hard to control. I agree with the masses that the stock tires aren't sufficient. especially with the stock gears. Check out the video in the side bar to see how my first outing went. spoiler alert, I broke it.

I quickly ordered a new set of gears 21/46. Since this thing is so damn fast as it is I was hesitant to put faster gears in it. However, it was a great idea. With the faster gears I can put the power down much better.

The next step is to get the Castle Link to set up the ESC. One of the things I want to do is raise the LVC.
I also have other plans that include:
- New tires, everyone seems to like the Proline Badlands
- Fan for the motor
- Shock/Spring upgrades, it bottoms out on small jumps with the stock compliment
- New body
- Swap TX/RX with my DX3E
- Aluminum servo horn
- Possibly better servo

I really want to get a handle on the heat this thing produces. The battery, motor, and center diff get pretty warm running in regular summer temps. I'm thinking about getting a temperature alarm system and maybe find a good way to vent some of the heat from under the body. Not sure if that's even a good idea.

Overall I'm having the most fun I've had playing with RC.

Video from my first bash with the Vorza

HPI Vorza Flux HP

I'm pretty excited about this one. I have a HPI Vorza on order.

As far as I know the Vorza has been around since at least 2009. Since then lots of people have complained out how heavy it is and that it's not suitable for competition. I can't speak for HPI, but the marketing material I've seen never suggests that the Vorza is anything other than a basher.

Once I get it and get it tuned, I would like to take it to a track for fun, but I have no plans at all to race it formally.

The Vorza seems to have a small audience. I'm guessing the basher community prefers monster trucks and not buggys for bashing. The reason I prefer the buggy over the monster trucks is because I like the semi-scale appearance of the Vorza and the mechanics of the buggy style RC. To me buggies are the perfect mix of on-road, track, and off-road. That gives me more option for running it in my opinion.

With that small audience comes way less option part support. My understanding is the best most basic way to improve the performance for the Vorza is a slammin battery (Turnigy 6S) and gearing (from HPI).

Hopefully HPI and others will have replacement parts available for a while. It would suck to buy something, break a major part that you can't replace.

My upgrade plans for the Vorza include:
20T Pinion
46T Spur
Turnigy 6S 3.3ah
Pro-Line Badlands
remove stock decals and re-paint the body
Maybe paint the wheels

I'll eventually get a set of road tires since I live around a lot of asphalt.

I'll post pics once I get it tuned up and running!

Marantz NR1403

I've been talking about upgrading my AVR for a long long time. I had an old RCA receiver for the better part of 15 years. It did the job, but was starting to hiss and it had no digital inputs.

That's enough about my old receiver. Time to introduce my new AVR, Marantz NR1403.

Never mind the dust and bad wire management.

It's a slimline AVR with a lot of nice features. You can find the features at their website below.

Marantz NR1403 Website

It sounds great! My favorite features are Dynamic Volume and Power-On Level.

Dynamic volume is a sort of automatic level adjustment that evens out the audio level to reduce large volume increases and it brings the level up during quiet scenes. I live in an apartment so this is really handy, not to mention Hollywood these days seems to have a real hard-on for loud effects scenes and swells in the  music. I only wish the "heavy" setting was slightly heavier. I still sometimes have to turn down the volume for some scenes. Another feature which is nice, is the ability to turn off the volume indicator in the OSD. So when I do need to adjust the volume during a movie, I don't need to see the giant volume level indicator on the bottom of the screen. They seem to have thought through their features.

The power on level feature insures that you dont blast yourself out of the room if you powered off the unit with the volume turned up.

I don't really use the HDMI switching, I only use one HDMI input the rest of my inputs are run into the TV and passed through as optical.

I don't think this should unit should be bought by someone that wants a simple set-and-forget AVR. It has lots of settings and the manual needs to be read in order to set things up properly. There are lots of menus to get lost in. You will definitely want to use the OSD when configuring the unit for the first time.

I've used Marantz in the professional world and always thought they were decent quality goods. This unit is heavy for how small it is. Which hopefully means it's packed with quality components.

The set-up microphone seems to work really well. I feel like it balanced out the room nicely, and since I currently have an eclectic collection of speakers it's nice to have a way to bring them all together.

I feel like with this unit, you are getting a lot of the features of their higher end models but at a entry level AVR price. Marantz seems like the kind of company that doesn't make you pay for every little bell or whistle.

I think I'll be getting years of good use out of this AVR.

LG 60LM7200 - Home Theater Upgrade

I've been working with some fairly outdated home theater components for a while now. My TV was a Sony KDS-60A2000, which is a 60" HD rear projection set. My AVR was completely analog RCA boat anchor that really deserves no more description.

The perfect storm that resulted in me upgrading my equipment consisted of my TV picture turning a slight shade of green and my overpayment to Uncle Sam the year before that resulted in a decent tax return this year.

Sony admittedly had a problem with the SXRD line of RP sets which was caused by the bulb over heating the covering on the LCOS panel which results in an uneven discoloration in the picture. Oddly enough I have a friend with an older model with the same problem. He has a new TV now too!

So after shopping around for a few months familiarizing myself with the current models on the market, I widdled down my choices to the GT50 models from Panasonic and the higher end Samsung plasmas.

The plasmas were just too dark. The picture looked nice but was just too dark and the brightness and contrast settings had little affect.

Then I popped around the corner where they keep the LEDs and one set stood out of the crowd...the LG 60lm7200!

This set has a very bright, very crisp, very rich picture. I won't pretend this is the best set on the market, but for the class it's in and the price it sells for, it's a great deal. I won't rattle off the specs, you can find them at LG's site for yourself.

http://www.lg.com/us/tvs/lg-60LM7200-led-tv

I will tell you what I like and don't like about it. The bad news first....

The major letdown for me is the remote. Although it does control other devices, big plus, the pointer isn't easy to use.

The set also has a pretty mean glare, I think most modern TV's have this issue, some do a better job at mitigating glare than others. During daylight hours watching TV is challenging since I have giant windows in my living room. I had to relocate two lamps to minimize reflection. Luckily the stand swivels 10 degrees to also help mitigate glare.

 Changing inputs is not easy. And the menus are thorough, but laid out in a less than easy way to access, and the volume indicator just looks weird to me.

All that being said I can get past all these downfalls for the picture quality, the price, the slim bezel, the well designed stand, and I'll say it again....the picture quality.

The passive 3D looks fantastic, it comes with 6 pairs of lightweight glasses. Be careful when cleaning the lenses, they are fragile.

I read somewhere that LG figured out how to make full res passive 3D, but I haven't verified it. I'll say a borrowed Avatar Blu-Ray play through a PS3 looked phenomenal. Tons of color, the 3D was pleasing in 95% of the film, and some scenes looked "Whoa" good.

The jury is still out on the 3D gaming aspect of this TV. I only have Uncharted 3 to sample. So far it looks great and is done well enough to add to the game and not distract you from it. I've played Battlefield 3 in 2D to 3D mode. Although it does actually look good and almost like real 3D, it's not suggested because the action is so fast the 3D effect detracts from your ability to process the game action. Maybe it will just take time to get used to. Hopefully BF4 will have a native 3D mode.

The remote remains a thorn in my side with this set. I need to reduce my remote count, but with this remote and the lack of control my Fios remote has over the set, I still have this mess.