Author: mark

  • Colorado Mountain Wave in a Cessna 206 Turbo

    I thought I’d document my experience in Colorado Mountain Wave in my 206 on a recent flight from Idaho to Centennial, CO. The details are as follows:

    • Plane is a 206 Turbo with G1000 NXi and I imported the data from the data card into CloudAhoy which is how I made the video.
    • Wind that day was 270 at 35 KTS at 15,500 MSL which was my crossing altitude.
    • Crossing point was the East Portal which is a common crossing point for GA VFR aircraft. It’s kind of like a low wall with taller peaks north and south.
    • I think there was a high altitude temperature inversion that day but unfortunately did not confirm that and I can’t find a historic source for winds aloft to confirm this. Let me know if you know of one.
    • As I approached the rockies from the west, lenticular clouds were visible to the north and south with a cloud above me that may have been a lenticular cloud.

    I normally cross the East Portal at around 14,000 but after seeing the conditions for mountain wave I climbed up to 15,500 to give myself a bit more room. As I crossed the ridge I had the autopilot enabled and I encountered a descending column of air – perhaps at 1000fpm. The autopilot did its job and worked to maintain 15,500 which meant the plane entered a climb within that descending column of air and I watched my airspeed slow down from about 123 indicated to 97 IAS.

    I’d like to dwell on that for a moment. A friend of mine who is an accomplished instrument rated pilot was in a higher performance aircraft crossing the Sierras from west to east at night in IMC and encountered the same effect. A westerly wind was crossing the Sierras, which is also famous for mountain wave effect and creating a downward flow on the leeward side. The autopilot tried to maintain altitude and the plane slowed down enough that when he finally noticed it really got his attention.

    I was told this story in person and reading between the lines this left a strong impression on him. I think part of the reason is that in the higher performance plane his stall speed was fairly high, so the potential to have the autopilot drop the airspeed enough to stall the plane was higher. I don’t know if his plane had Garmin ESP. Mine does, and it will nudge the nose down if the plane appears to be entering a power on stall. I plan to verify this.

    Once the airspeed crossed 100 kts and continued to drop, I turned the AP off and pointed the nose down. At this point the airflow across the ridge and in the leeward side at 15,500 was laminar – very smooth. You can see this in the video below if you look at the G meter in the top left.

    As I descended and moved further away from the ridge, I think what happened is I moved below that laminar flow. As I got out into the foothills and at around 13,700 MSL which was 5,200 AGL I was hit with moderate turbulence. In FAA terms, moderate is passengers screaming and crying and severe is the airframe at risk of taking damage. I’d say I was on the high side of moderate.

    I experienced plus 1 G (or plus 2 if you want to nitpick and point out that 1G is at rest) and negative 0.5 to 0.7 although I haven’t verified this. You can see the G meter in the video. The aircraft can handle +3.8G and -1.52 flaps up.

    I got one thing right and made two mistakes. Crossing at a much higher altitude and maintaining that higher altitude than normal give me plenty of room AGL to recover from a stall/spin scenario. The first mistake was to descend at an airspeed that was far too high given the potential for turbulence. I hit the turbulence at around 150kts indicated and within a second due to wind shear the ASI jumps to 163.

    I pulled power at that point and gently nosed up to avoid increased G loading on the airframe, but was doing everything I could to rapidly reduce my speed. The turbulence was short and sharp. The G loading wasn’t particularly high in terms of what the airframe can stand at my weight and balance, and given that I’d burned most of my fuel, but the short sharp nature of it was of real concern.

    I then made the second mistake which was to slow down too much. I think I got as slow as 83 indicated, which is way above the published clean stall speed of 62 KCAS but given the wind shear, I should have kept it at maneuvering speed which ranges from 106 KIAS to 125 KIAS with the lower speed being for lighter aircraft loading. I was probably around 110 KIAS given my fuel and load. 105 KIAS would have been a safe speed to do the entire descent.

    I was talking to Denver Departure so called them up and gave them a moderate to severe turbulence PIREP which I revised a couple of minutes later to Moderate.

    Right before I encountered the turbulence I saw my VSI indicate I was entering an ascending column of air. It’s hard to tell how fast it was ascending because I nosed up to reduce airspeed. My VSI peaked at 3100 fpm. But I then encountered a descending column of air which was also 3100 fpm with pitch level. That’s around 31 knots of descending air, to put it in perspective. My tail wind at that point was 40 kts based on the difference between TAS and ground speed via CloudAhoy. So 40 knots horizontal and 30 kts downward. Fun stuff.

    This effect is due to a laminar mountain wave flowing over the rockies and extending in a repeating sine wave over the plains. But underneath that laminar flow you get a strong rotor effect which can do severe damage to aircraft.

    Around the same time a TBM reported severe turbulence within KAPA’s (Centennial’s) Delta which is quite far east from the foothills. As I approached KAPA the turbulence became very intermittent but I can see how a rotor might have reached down into KAPAs Delta and knocked that TBM around given what I had experienced from 13,700 down to 11,000.

    I’ve done a fair amount of reading about mountain wave, but that doesn’t prepare you for real world experience – and unfortunately in my case the knowledge didn’t bed down enough for me to slow down to maneuvering speed on my descent, which of course I’m really beating myself up over.

    My takeaways are as follows:

    • Avoid the leeward side of the Rockies in mountain wave conditions.
    • If you absolutely have to be in the lee of the rockies in these conditions (I can’t imagine why – maybe research, maybe a mistake), give yourself plenty of altitude, slow down to whatever your POH says is turbulent air penetration speed, and lock everything down. You’re going to get beaten up. I was rolled a few times fairly aggressively too – to about 45 degrees before I caught it each time. Very quick rolls.
    • Absolutely do not head westward towards the lee side of the slope with ascending terrain, even if you have a turbo. You’re liable to not notice your reducing AGL altitude and if you encounter a severe downdraft you could easily get smacked into the mountain. We recently lost a CAP piston single in the lee of one of the slopes. It looks like they entered the lee at only 500 AGL with 35 kts over the ridge.
    • This time of year in fall/winter/spring we frequenty see mountain waves, so I’ll either avoid crossing the high Rockies, or try to time it when winds aloft are less than 20 kts which sometimes happens in the mornings.

    Here’s a video of the telemetry imported into CloudAhoy which provides a simulation of the flight. I’ve added a narration. Clearly this is designed for interested aviators and not the YouTube crowd. 🙂

    Further reading:

  • Briefing Something Mission Critical When Failure Is Not An Option

    I started my career in IT operations moving to London and working on initially Coca Cola’s infrastructure, and then moving into investment banking and working on trade floor infrastructure. This was after being based in South Africa and doing quite a lot of work for DeBeers on e.g. the most productive diamond mine in the world at the time. I absolutely loved working on mission critical systems. Love the rush. Loved at 4am being one of a small team doing a complex deployment on a sometimes multi-billion dollar business, where failure was not an option.

    So failure not being an option is something that has fascinated me. I’m an instrument rated pilot. I fly a Cessna 206 in what in aviation is referred to as single pilot IFR – meaning that I’m flying on an instrument flight plan in bad weather i.e. in the clouds, and there’s only one of me in the cockpit. It’s some of the most demanding flying one can do in terms of cognitive workload. And of course failure is absolutely not an option.

    In instrument flying we use approach plates to conduct an instrument approach. The approach phase is one of the busiest times in the cockpit along with doing an instrument departure procedure. The approach plate is a one page easy to read summary of several critical pieces of information, like what my frequencies are, what my critical altitudes are, what path I’m flying and what to do if, when I get to the runway, the clouds are so low that I can’t see it and I have to execute a missed approach.

    There’s a technique we use called “briefing the approach” which is really designed for a two pilot environment, but us single pilot IFR guys use the same technique. You’ll do a read-through of the instrument approach plate before you actually start flying the approach, and you’ll do it at a time when you’re not as busy as you’re about to be. Starting at the top you’ll read through items like frequencies, navigational fixes, minimum altitudes, missed procedure and so on.

    I can’t share the approach plates I use because they’re published by Jeppesen and are copyrighted, but here is the FAA plate for the approach on Orcas Island where I live, that I fly quite a lot.

    The briefing from the top of the plate will go something like this:

    • OK so the approach we’re doing is the RNAV runway 16 at Orcas Island
    • Our approach course is 193 degrees
    • Airport elevation and touchdown zone elevation are 35 feet
    • AWOS frequency [for the weather] is 135.425 and we’ve already given it a listen and have the weather
    • Whidbey approach frequency is 118.2 and we’re already talking to them and we’ll be switching to Victoria on 132.7 soon and I have that dialed in
    • Once we’re on the approach they’ll switch us to the advisory frequency which is 128.25 and I have that ready.
    • Our final approach fix is CALBI which we’ll cross at 1900 or above.
    • We’re doing an LP approach and our minimums are 340ft and I’ve got that dialed in.
    • Our missed procedure is…..

    [Side note: If you’re instrument rated, don’t nit pick my briefing here. It’s designed to be parsable by non-pilots and is for illustrative purposes only.]

    And so it goes. It’s a relatively quick process and it’s more concise then I’ve described here because there’s some jargon used.

    As a single pilot flying IFR (instrument flight rules) you literally say the briefing out loud to yourself before flying the approach. This technique is one of the many that aviation has come up with to mitigate the weakest link in aviation, which is the human being at the controls. In general aviation (non scheduled flights like I fly) around 78% of accidents are caused by the human. And so aviation spends a lot of time coming up with techniques like this to mitigate the risk of the human making a mistake.

    Surgery has a similar technique called the timeout. The timeout is essentially the surgical team “briefing” the procedure. This includes basic items like the patient identity and the surgical site. It’s to prevent fundamental errors like wrong site, wrong person or wrong procedure errors.

    I’ve incorporated this concept into my business (Defiant Inc which makes Wordfence) and my personal life. If I’m about to hitch a 10,000 pound trailer to my truck, take it into a ferry and go do a bunch of stuff on the mainland, I’ll brief it with my wife to make sure we haven’t missed anything. Yeah – I know- that makes me sound like a bureaucratic pain in the ass, but we’ll just spend a couple minutes talking through what we’re about to do and whether we have everything we need.

    If we’re about to do something complex or mission critical at work I’ll brief it with the team. They don’t realize what I’m doing most of the time, but I’ll describe it as “briefing” the thing and we’ll just talk through what may seem to many on the call as some obvious details. Sometimes something will fall out that we need to address, or we’ll go deep on an issue.

    When you’re doing something that is mission critical where failure is not an option, consider briefing the thing. Just talk through what you’re about to do and the pertinent details. It’s really just a mental shift where you’re fully dedicating your mental capacity to thinking about what you’re about to do and the details, rather than assuming you’ve got it all figured out. And then when you get busy or are under pressure, you’ll have all the data and procedures stored in your short term mental cache ready to go.

    Footnote: “Failure is not an option” doesn’t originate from NASA. It actually comes from the film Apollo 13. But from what I’ve seen, aviation has enthusiastically adopted the phrase.

  • And Back Again.

    Just a test first blog post. Spent the afternoon setting up my blog and migrating the data from an archive I had stashed away. Managed to get posts going all the way back to 2007. Woohoo I have a blog again! And wow, things haven’t changed much at all. Still reverse proxying nginx to apache with letsencrypt and an htaccess file. The Web is very much still the same.

     

  • Wordfence Reviews – Find them on WordPress.org

    I’m posting this to help our customers find objective Wordfence reviews. If you are short on time and would like to view objective, reliable reviews for Wordfence that are moderated by volunteer WordPress moderators to remove spam, you can visit the Wordfence plugin review page on WordPress.org.

    I’m the founder and CEO of Wordfence. We make the most popular firewall and malware scanner for WordPress. We also offer a site cleaning and site security audit service.

    If you do a google search for ‘wordfence reviews’ or ‘wordfence review’, it is quite likely that the first page of results may contain a competitor who has posted something that appears to be an ‘objective’ wordfence review on his personal blog. That was posted in 2012 and I think it’s quite unreasonable for us to expect a direct competitor to have anything good to say about us, which he didn’t. 🙂

    The hosting landscape is complex and there are many affiliate and business partnerships between security companies, hosting companies etc. It’s like spaghetti. For example, one major security company is owned by the founders of a huge hosting conglomerate. In another case, a major security company was bought by one of the largest hosting companies but still trades under it’s own brand. And then there are affiliate schemes or ‘kickbacks’ that motivate bloggers to write great reviews for one security provider and bad reviews for another.

    The bottom line is that it can be challenging to find objective reviews for Wordfence. The good news is that there is a source that you can rely on, it is 100% objective and it is controlled by a group of volunteer moderators who are awesome and who do a great job of removing spam and making sure that all reviews stay objective.

    Your most reliable and objective source of Wordfence reviews is the WordPress plugin repository.

    The plugin repository is where we distribute Wordfence. It is an open source collection of plugins available for WordPress. Anyone who uses a plugin and has signed up for a wordpress.org account can post a review on this page.

    The moderators who filter out spam are volunteers and they do a really great job of making sure vendors don’t ‘stuff’ good reviews into their product. They also make sure that competitors don’t come in and spam reviews to make someone else look bad.

    If you have a support issue related to Wordfence, I would also encourage you to search our forums for a solution or post there if you need help. We have dedicated team members who reply to our free customers in the forums. Our awesome support is why we have so many great reviews and a 5 star rating.

    Wordfence reviews

    Wordfence also has premium support for our paid customers which you can find at support.wordfence.com.

    I hope this blog post has cleared up any confusion on where to find objective and reliable Wordfence reviews.

    Regards,

    Mark Maunder – Wordfence founder/ceo.

    PS: Reviews like this one below from one of our customers really made my day. It also made Phil’s day. Phil is the security analyst who helped Mike recover from a hacked site. This review was posted today. Mike is one of many happy customers who have used Wordfence to help stay secure.

    Wordfence review

     

  • Why the term "cyber" is cool.

    In 1986 William Gibson published Neuromancer, his masterpiece. In it he coined the term ‘cyberspace’. For many of us it described the world of ‘computers’ at the time. It captured the experience of disappearing into code.

    Later ‘cyberspace’ was an uncannily accurate metaphor for getting online and disappearing into, for me, the telephone networks through phone phreaking and later the Internet and the text based online communities like IRC, NNTP, telnet based MUDs and so on.

    The term ‘cyber’ is now mocked by those in information security as something uncool. I’m not sure why but I think it’s because the term has been coopted by companies trying to sell products in cyber security.

    For me and I think many others, ‘cyber’ and ‘cyberspace’ are precious reminders of the beauty of Gibson’s writing and how he accidentally captured the reality that was to follow in a beautiful metaphor.

    This is my favorite passage from Neuromancer as Case is cured and once again is able to access cyberspace. What I love about this passage is that it captures the sense of longing many of us have when we exist in the real world and the sense of belonging when we’re online.

    And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes
boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking
past like film compiled from random frames.  Symbols, figures,
faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.
  Please, he prayed, _now --_
  A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.
  _Now --_
  Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler
gray.  Expanding --
  And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the
unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent
3D chessboard extending to infinity.  Inner eye opening to the
stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Au-
thority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of
America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms
of military systems, forever beyond his reach.
  And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft,
distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his
face.

  • Working On-Site Considered Harmful

    It doesn’t make sense for knowledge workers to be on-site anymore.

    Working on-site comes with a significant cost. Quiet time is a precious commodity if you’re in any kind of cerebral role –  and it’s rare in most office environments. Then there’s the distraction of commuting to work, commuting back, people coming and going, the office socializer who wants to chat and so on.

    Working remotely has many advantages. If you’re using Slack, you don’t have a situation where the dominant person in the room gets to drown out other opinions. It makes communication more democratic and a side effect is that communication becomes much more relaxed. Less conflict == more fun and getting more done.

    When interaction happens via git and a bug tracker in the form of entering and updating issues and pull requests, it keeps things moving forward without the unstructured chaos that in-person communication can create. SaaS for remote workers makes communication more structured.

    It surprises me that so many companies in the software space are still hiring on-site workers and developers in particular. I suspect it’s for two reasons:

    Firstly, managers or execs think a major part of their contribution is to “oversee” their team. This comes from a kind of personal insecurity caused by them not being able to contribute in other areas – frequently because they’re non-technical, so they need to “manage” to contribute. This is solved by hiring execs or managers who are competent in their own right – and in a tech company they need to be hands-on technical and current in their skills. I’ve met too many managers who just “manage” and mention their MIT degree and tell coding war stories.

    Secondly, I think a reason companies want to hire on-site workers is a lack of trust. They don’t think it’s possible to hire people who can be left alone to create amazing things. They think the team has to be put in a room and monitored at all times. This has evolved into persuading them to stay in the room by bringing chefs and masseuses into the office.

    I think over the next 10 years we will see the first Google’s and Amazon’s emerge with 100% remote workers. They will create a new normal for tech companies to go remote. That will cause a massive exodus from urban centers. It’s going to have a huge impact on property prices and rentals and a significant impact on the landscape. Cities like Seattle, which is overcrowded with Amazon workers will see profound changes.

    Fifteen years from now we’ll look back and giggle at how we used to crowd smart people into little boxes with bright fluorescent lighting so that we could watch them while they did work they can do from anywhere.

    We’re hiring at Wordfence. All our roles are remote. We’re a team of 9 full-timers and we have 7 positions currently open (the forensics role is X3). If you’re the best in the world at what you do, are passionate about information security and you’d like to regain your freedom, we’d love to hear from you!

  • The Longer Term Effects of the Paris Tragedy

    Having recently lived in France for a year, my heart goes out to the French people. I lived in South Western France, but fell in love with Paris as a city of art, philosophy, history and music. That it was targeted with such violence last night is a travesty of epic proportions.

    London Bridge
    London Bridge lit up with the colors of the French Flag tonight.

    At this time there are 129 deaths and 352 injured according to Le Monde.

    I’d like to spend a few minutes thinking about the longer term effects of what just happened in Paris. My background if you don’t know me is: I’m a CEO of a cyber security company, I’m a software engineer and I’m interested in public policy.

    2,977 victims died in the World Trade Center attacks on September 11th 2001. The attacks had a profound effect on public policy and foreign policy world-wide. The result was a US led war in Afghanistan and a further war with Iraq. The cost and effect of these wars continue to this day, 14 years later.

    The WTC attacks also led to the Patriot Act and a huge increase in surveillance by the United States and intelligence partners. The intelligence partners are the “Five Eyes”  which include the USA, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The Patriot act was the tip of the iceberg and since the Snowden revelations we have now learned the depth and breadth of the increase in intelligence gathering and surveillance post 9/11.

    The Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai showing French colors tonight.
    The Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai showing French colors tonight.

    The impact of the WTC attacks can, today, in my opinion, be compared to the impact of the Pearl Harbor attack in the way it changed US foreign policy and public policy. The day after the Pearl Harbor attack, the US declared war on Japan and Roosevelt and later Truman demanded the ‘unconditional surrender’ of Japan as the only acceptable end to the conflict.

    More recently, post 9/11 in the United States and world-wide the public appetite for conflict had started to taper off starting in 2008 with the Obama campaign that ran on a platform of exiting Iraq.

    Added to this there was a tapering in the public appetite and tolerance of surveillance with the Manning leaks published on Wikileaks in 2010 and the Snowden revelations in 2013.

    The number of casualties in Paris yesterday are not as high as Pearl Harbor or 9/11, but we live in a post 9/11 World where we already have an increase in conflict and surveillance. The public also has an increased sensitivity to these kinds of attacks.

    The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin
    The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin

    In my view, the Paris attacks will bring us back to the world-wide climate we encountered immediately post 9/11. It will ensure that France enters any war it hopes will reduce the threat of domestic terror and France will go beyond that. France will actively, as the USA did, seek retribution for the attacks yesterday. Manuel Valls (France’s Prime Minister – the equivalent of a Chief Operating Officer) said today that “We must annihilate the enemies of the Republic”, which sets the tone of the response going forward.

    If this had happened in the absence of 9/11, the French response would have been severe, but would not necessarily have been backed by a long term global response. Because this is post 9/11 and because it refreshes the global memory of the impact of terrorism, this will have a much wider influence on global governments and their public and foreign policy.

    The Sydney Opera House Tonight
    The Sydney Opera House Tonight

    I expect that there is a show of solidarity with France that goes beyond countries displaying the French flag on public and private buildings last night and tonight.

    France will likely be brought closer into the Five Eyes intelligence sharing arrangement which has so far excluded all European countries with the exception of the United Kingdom. [And in fact had an adversarial relationship with countries like Germany]

    In response to Charlie Hebdo, France passed a new surveillance law in May that allows the monitoring of phone calls and emails without the authorization of a judge. The law also requires ISP’s to install devices to sniff Internet traffic and make that traffic available to French intelligence services. The law is essentially the USA Patriot Act without the need for a FISA court to authorize surveillance.

    San Francisco City Hall
    San Francisco City Hall

    The tragedy yesterday will likely provide the impetus to pass additional laws that cover anything that legislation earlier this year may have missed. That earlier law doesn’t appear to have missed much.

    I hold no strong opinions either way on public surveillance. That we appear to need surveillance, I consider tragic. I’d also prefer to not have secrets, but a thought experiment I came up with a few years ago seems to indicate that the need for secrets is inevitable.

    My interest is in understanding what will happen next, and we appear to be headed into a deeper spiral of surveillance, conflict and secrecy. I’d prefer that things were different, but I’m angry too.

  • 3DR Tech Data and Review

    I owned an IRIS+ by 3DR from Jan this year until a couple months ago when I lost it in a large desolate area in South Africa. The search is still on. As a former IRIS+ owner that pushed my drone to the limits of what it can do, I thought I’d post my first impressions of the Solo by 3DR. This is targeted at an advanced audience.

    For some context, here’s video I shot with my IRIS+ earlier this year using a Hero 4 Black and the Tarot T-2D brushless gimbal.

    I got my first Solo this week. The unboxing experience is awesome – well done 3DR, very Applesque.

    The first person video via iPad is awesome. The way 3DR has designed the drone is interesting. With the IRIS+ you had a controller that spoke 2.4Ghz to the drone to control it. Then you had a separate radio that spoke 900Mhz also to another transceiver on the drone which is how you received telemetry. I actually loved this setup on the IRIS+ because the 900 Mhz radio had significantly further range than the 2.4ghz radio and it’s easy to buy high gain directional 900 mhz antennas or antenna amplifiers.

    The Solo has a single 2.4 Ghz radio onboard which talks to the controller. The controller acts as a Wifi base station. All devices (like your iPad or android phone) connect to the controller as a wifi base station. As soon as you connect what happens is the controller starts sending your device UDP packets to port 14550. If you have software running that’s listening at that port, the software receives the data from the controller and displays it in the user interface.

    So you can have an iPad, Android phone and a PC all connected to the controller at the same time receiving data from the drone.

    The Solo has two antennas that are in the legs, diagonally opposite each other. There is a third leg that has a tiny circuit board and I suspect this is a GPS antenna, but I’m unsure at this time.

    I disassembled my solo. A few tips on disassembly:

    • The shiny black hood does in fact come off. You need to unclip it from the underside. Look closely under it and you’ll see three tabs. If you push those out with a screwdriver you’ll get it off.
    • Unlike the IRIS+ the main board is harder to get out. You need to unclip most of the electronic plugs that are on the board to be able to see the underside. Then you can slide it out partially. I didn’t go further than that because it looked like I’d need to start unsoldering things to get it completely out of the aircraft.

    The two antennas in the legs are MIMO antennas and I haven’t verified this but I’m assuming they’re talking 801.22n to the drone. I suspect what 3DR have done is to have the drone connect to the controller as a base station like other devices have, but I haven’t confirmed this and have no data to support this theory. I used a wifi sniffer to give me the data that I have on how the controller speaks UDP to clients, but my wifi sniffer is only 802.11b/g and I’ve ordered a card that supports 802.11n but am waiting or it to arrive. Once I have that, I will be able to tell if the drone is speaking 802.11n to the controller or if it’s speaking a proprietary protocol.

    To use Mission Planner with the Solo, you need to connect to the controller’s wifi as a hotspot. Then launch Mission Planner and select ‘UDP’ as your connection type and hit ‘connect’. You should immediately download the config and start receiving telemetry.

    Good news: Even though 3DR have completely hidden away the ability for the Solo to fly a flight plan in full Auto mode, you can still do it. Here’s how:

    • Launch Mission Planner
    • Set up a flight plan with waypoints etc.
    • Upload it to the drone.
    • Arm the Solo.
    • Then go into ‘Flight Data’ and click the ‘Actions’ tab on the bottom left.
    • Select ‘Auto’ from the drop down list and click the ‘Set Mode’ button.
    • The Solo will immediately launch. This is different from the IRIS+ which required you to put the controller into ‘Auto’ and goose the throttle slightly to trigger the Auto program.

    It’s funny watching the iPad app show the flight mode switch to “Autonomous” when it doesn’t actually list it as a flight mode, even using the advanced options.

    So how about performance. Here’s how you can turn the Solo into a mean machine when flying autonomous programs. If the above didn’t void your warranty, this definitely will.

    Go into Config/Tuning in Mission Planner and you can change the following if you dare:

    • Do a search for ‘speed’ and you’ll find many things you’ll enjoy playing with.
    • I changed Waypoint Horizontal Speed Target to 2000 or 20m/s. Verified the Solo can handle this but didn’t try a program that had enough distance to let it fully reach that speed along a track. Note that with the IRIS+ I ran into an issue where using spline waypoints the aircraft would lose altitude if I set the horizontal speed too high because it appeared to give the horizontal speed precedence over maintaining altitude. So careful of setting this high on the Solo. Not sure if the same issue exists.
    • Waypoint Descent Speed. Changed this to 300cm/s or 3m/s. Verified the Solo can handle this and flies fine. However note: Changing your descent speed with any drone is very dangerous because the aircraft is descending into it’s own prop-wash (turbulence created by the propellors). If you make this too high the aircraft can get very unstable and flip or crash. I had my IRIS+ hit snow very hard one night when I set this too high.
    • Waypoint Climb Speed Target. Definitely my favorite if you are doing an auto program and want the aircraft to get to altitude as fast as possible. The max I’ve tried this with the Solo is 1000cm/s or 10 meters per second. It’s awesome – absolutely rockets into the sky.

    Once you’ve tweaked a few of these settings you’re probably still wondering why your Solo is a little sluggish. Here’s how you make her zip:

    • Again on the Config/Tuning Standard Params page, do a search for ‘accel’
    • Waypoint Acceleration. I’ve set this to 500 (default for the Solo is 100)  which is the max and tested the Solo doing laps and it handles it fine without crashing.
    • Waypoint Vertical Acceleration. I’ve tested this at 200 (default is 100) and it works great.

    So what do I think of the Solo by 3DR? The one issue I’ve found is that GPS signal around my house is a little glitchy. The Solo reacts to this by accelerating hard in a certain direction when I have it in beginner “Fly” mode which is what every newbie will use when they fly for the first time. This is probably going to be a disaster. I had to use every ounce of my skill as a drone pilot to not crash the Solo when it did this. It has so far done this 3 times to me over 2 days of flying. When it happened the aircraft was definitely going to crash into an obstacle and the only way to avoid it was to climb and give full opposite joystick – so unless you do that when this happens to you, you’re going to be wearing a frowny first-time drone pilot face as you send your smashed Solo back to 3DR and wait weeks or more for a replacement. Very worrying. I suspect 3DR will fix this by cross-referencing the data from the gyros with what the GPS is claiming and maybe not accelerate so hard to try to correct any GPS position errors.

    I also had a landing where the drone ended up in a rhythmic bounce with the engines racing and I couldn’t shut them down even though I had full negative throttle. I just held it down, thankfully it didn’t flip and eventually go the idea.

    I’m unsure how the 2.4 Ghz radio is going to work out. I already have a set of dual high gain antennas I bought from http://fpvlr.com/ (Thanks Tony for the awesome fast shipping) and haven’t tried them out yet, but they look solid. I think if I can get an antenna tracker working with the Solo with dual high gain antennas, it’s probably feasible to get telemetry, control and video over 3+ miles which is going to be amazing.

    The drone itself is a nice improvement. Design is really polished, the battery life is now 20 minutes with a full payload and it seems to fly better than the IRIS+ but I’d like to check how it flies with a Gimbal.

    Speaking of Gimbals, they don’t actually exist. 3DR is still figuring out how to get them manufactured and posted this blog entry 3 days ago saying the first Gimbals for the Solo will be coming off the line at the end of July. (!!!) Wow, guys, taking just-in-time shipping to a whole new level of I’m-not-sure-what-ness.

    So don’t expect to be playing with the Solo Gimbal any time soon.

    Bottom line: I’m a huge fan of 3D Robotics, even though this post was written a little tongue in cheek. I think the Solo rocks but I’d say this is a Beta release based on the GPS glitching that I’ve seen and the landing issue. For guys like me who love voiding warranties, it’s fun to get early access to a platform like this. I can’t wait to play with the Python Dronekit API and I’m enjoying pushing the aircraft to it’s limits and playing with my packet sniffer to see what’s happening under the hood. However I wouldn’t recommend the platform for newbies until say October/November this year when the Gimbal has been out a few months, there have been a few software updates and the platform has had a chance to breathe.

  • Failure Is Not An Option

    If you raise money and fail, you need to consider the opportunity cost of another entrepreneur not having had access to the investment capital you lost. If you fail, you need to be sad about your failure and also be sad about the opportunity cost of your failure.

    But it’s “risk capital” you say – money that investment funds allocated to very high-risk/high-return investments. So the thinking is that it’s OK for that capital to go away because it’s expected to either succeed big and likely to fail. But what about the 1 or 10 or 50 other businesses that lost access to that capital once it was invested? Could one of them have been the next Google?

  • Try Buying your Hardware

    We took a lot of heat from the startup community when we bought $40,000 of Dell servers, a switch and a KVM and racked them ourselves in 2008. Seriously, Kerry (my wife and co-founder) and I hand-racked about 10 Dell 2950’s and a couple of 1950’s in the rack we leased at our data center. We didn’t realize the DC team could rack them for us and were so excited when the servers arrived we just dove right in.

    Do you have any idea how much a DELL 2950 loaded with disks weighs? They’re heavy.

    At that time the “cloud” was all the rage. Amazon services were really spinning up, Linode and SliceHost were the new ‘it’ companies, and we were derided as idiots for actually buying physical hardware: Ew!

    Well turns out our business scaled very quickly and in a few short months we were pushing well over 100 megabits of bandwidth average. We were paying around $2,500 a month for that which included power to the rack, a team supporting our hardware 24/7/365 and that included the bandwidth and 5 very high quality upstream connections. We’d discovered the magic of 95th percentile billing. Most of our peers were paying by the terrabyte and getting absolutely screwed. Our business would never have survived if we didn’t use colocation.

    Today we’re busy decomissioning our old Dell 1950’s and 2950’s and replacing them with amazing new Dell R630’s. Back then we were paying about $3500 per server. I just bought 4 Dell R630’s at $9250 each out the door. We’re happy to spend that kind of cash because we know these machines will pay for themselves a hundred times over (or more) by the time we’re done with them. We have a little inside joke: “Good servers go to small business heaven. Bad servers end up working for us.” We literally put our servers through hell by running them at very high CPU and IO loads. To date we haven’t had a single failure besides hard drives and redundant power supplies, all of which are hot-swappable and no big deal. No memory, chassis or controller issues. (We use PERC hardware RAID 1 or 10 usually)

    So I guess I’d like to say a big Kudos to Dell for producing some kick-ass enterprise class hardware that could withstand the worst kinds of loads we could come up with. And seriously: If you’re a startup and can afford it, consider making a capital investment in your own hardware and using colocation rather than abstracting away the problem and paying more – and in some cases, a hell of a lot more.

    Besides: What could be more fun that spending your Saturday night in the data center.