Posts

Finally a drone - DJI Mini 2 SE

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Wife wanted a drone and after checking out a few options, we decided to get one from UK. My buddy RKD was visiting India, so had him order one and get it here. It's got 30mins flight time one one battery. The controller has a range of 10KM line of sight. The camera can record 2k video and the gimbal provides great stabilization. Some videos: Lonavla road: https://youtu.be/Ly_tAyhwu1s Lonavla Shivling Point: https://youtu.be/9KZ4MQzPpA8 Mulshi dam backwaters: https://youtu.be/T57bWqf_TAw Ranjangaon Mahaganapati: https://youtu.be/Hd0FpGXCI8k Bhambarde Mandir: https://youtu.be/wvSkjdeVV6I It needs a 30W usb-c charger, so got one from Amazon - Honeywell branded and it charges fast. Also found out power bank can also charge fast via usb-c. There are 4 spare-blades but we need to be careful when landing. I already landed it in a bunch of dust and one time on a small plant which got shredded. Thankfully the propellers don't seem to have any damage. Lets hope I don't crash it or dr

New gadget DJI OSMO Mobile SE

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Got this baby for 9000/- INR Specs: Unfold, snap-in, and start rolling. Osmo Mobile SE's lightweight foldable body and magnetic quick-release design make it easy to carry and capture at a moment's notice. With the newly added status panel, you can switch gimbal modes with the push of a button. An array of intelligent features helps to dynamically shoot and highlight moments, adding a creative flair to anything you want to capture. 3-Axis Stabilization Magnetic Design Portable and Foldable ActiveTrack 6.0 Easy Tutorials and One-Tap Editing Quick Roll It's a great gimbal for 9000 odd rupees. I would have liked one higher end, but seeing the amount of video shooting I do using DSLR, I thought better to spend less and get this one. Cheers!!

New acquisitions and old hardware going strong

This december 2023, we finally bought a new TV. Its: VW 109 cm (43 inches) QL Frameless Series 4K Ultra HD Smart QLED TV VW43QUW1 (Black). This cost 22000/- INR and for a 43" QLED TV that's very good. Earlier I considered Hisense 43" QLED for 27K. But later thought of saving some money. This TV has below specs: Brand ‎VW Manufacturer ‎Beston Sky Vision Pvt. Ltd, VW_VW Model ‎VW43QUW1 Model Name ‎VW43QUW1 Model Year ‎2023 Product Dimensions ‎9 x 109 x 57 cm; 8.2 Kilograms Item model number ‎VW43QUW1 Memory Storage Capacity ‎8 GB Ram Memory Installed Size ‎1.5 GB Operating System ‎WebOS Hardware Interface ‎3.5mm Audio Graphics Coprocessor ‎IMG BXE4 GPU (700Mhz) Tuner Technology ‎DVB-T Response Time ‎8 Milliseconds Resolution ‎4K Special Features ‎QLED display | 4K HDR | HDR10+ | HLG | MEMC | Powered by webOS TV | Magic Remote | ThinQ AI Voice Assistant | Intelligent Edit | Universal Control via Magic Remote to Control Connected Devices | Apple Air Play | App

weird resolution with our Samsung TV

We have a 32" Samsung TV that was bought by my father and it advertised Full-HD resolution. But it did not have good picture quality. Then it reached me when parents moved in here. Then my monitor went kaput and as this TV was unused, I decided to use it. Turns out the text quality is really bad and it has resolution-wise issues. I experimented around and then found out that the panel is actually not FHD. But it has WSXGA+ resolution - 1680x1050. So at this resolution this makes a decent good monitor. But really weird case of hardware.

Hero Duet - more than 34000km

It's end of year 2022, and our Hero Duet has completed 6 years couple of months ago. It's crossed 34000km and recently few months back a big service which cost me about 4500/-. The scooter as of now runs like new, the engine has same vibes. We have not lost any original hardware. And beside some consumable replacements, the scooter body is holding well. Lets talk about the repairs: 1. Fix front fork out 2. Replace suspension bush, engine mounts 3. Resurface VVT pully 4. Get kicker mechanism parts repaired 5. Get clutch scrubbed 6. Fork seal/bearings replaced 7. Replace air filter I had couple of 100+ km rides on it and things are improved. Though not to any extent that I want to do even 50+km rides on this thing. But it's good enough for local runabouts. I'm thinking of getting a bike for longer rides, but for now mind is in splits as it's much comfy and safer to take out the car for longer travel. But then riding on a bike/scooter has a different charm. Anyway the

Tool to find disk usage by folder size

windirstat is an amazing tool to get an idea of which folder is taking how much of the disk.

LibGpiod

I have so far never messed up with GPIO's. I have a raspberry Pi. But I almost always used it as a desktop computer and never as an embedded device. Anyway so this development ended up in my lap as we re-implemented the general purpose IO functionality in one of the new products at the current employer. And then it was proposed to use libgpiod. Turns out the library was quite easy to use. But then came time to test it. And first thing I got stuck was trying to find out which gpio devices or chipnames I have available. Few google searches confused me even more. Anyway after fiddling a bit here and there, I ended up with an option to try and access the actual prototypes. The device I had used a slightly different yocto SDK and the newer device just had a different libc version. After struggling for a while to sort out the errors, I thought of compiling the libgpiod library using the old device SDK. Turns out it needs autotools, which we don't have in the SDK. That put a hard-stop