Vesaero foamie comes alive

Today I started a new project I decided after much procrastinating that I was finally going to make an effort into bringing Vesaero foamie to life.

I started off a few weeks ago with nothing but a sketch.

Here I determined what was going to be  the overall look of the plane and how the mechanics might work. Also had many mental discussions with myself trying to figure out how I would work out weight issues and balance. No to mention where the control servos go.

Finally I decided what would make more sense is to just go for a profile build and work from there.

Because this is my first build and this is not an easy plane geometry wise I decided I needed to build a scale model in order for me to understand how the pieces will go together for the profile plane.

So now with the prototype scale model in place the serious planning on the first full scale build can begin… Damn this is exciting I love the look of the mini model too.

Dell battery Died for Good

Well after several conditioning runs today the battery decided it wasn’t going to charge anymore. After opening it up and forcing a few more manual charges the battery finally developed a failure.

Now when you plug it into the laptop instead of getting the battery status you get “Error Communicating with Battery” suggesting the SMART charging circuit is damaged. I guess it won’t hurt to keep these cells around for some other projects but I guess they are no longer good for laptop use.

It does seem suspicious that each battery lasts only slightly over a year and dell only offers a 1 year warranty on it’s battery. It’s almost as if there’s an internal timer that’s programmed to fail after a year.

If anyone else has a Dell 9400/e1705/ or XPS 1710 and would like to tell us about your battery experience feel free to comment.

Laptop battery acting up.

My Dell laptop battery is acting up again. It's giving me the 4 amber 1 green flashes suggesting temporary battery failure. Last time this was fixed with a couple of full conditioning charges.

(full discharge and charge cycles)

I'll do a few more but it is taking significantly longer to charge than discharge.