I’m always trying to figure out better ways to utilize Butter, What?!, and I believe I may have come up with a good idea! I don’t often keep things to myself. I’ve been writing about the projects and experiments I’m working on over at patshead.com, and I’ve been vlogging about some of this stuff over on YouTube, but these are all self contained write ups.

If you’re not following what I’m up to on Twitter, you might be missing out on some of the fun stuff I’m working on. Maybe you don’t want to follow my daily shenanigans on Twitter. Maybe you just want to stop by every once in a while to get a summary of the things I’ve been up to.

This is that summary!

I’m designing another open source quadcopter frame!

I feel like July began and ended with some pretty big quadcopter design milestones. Near the end of June, I started the work to convert the Kestrel, my 3” HD micro quadcopter frame, into something bigger, heavier, and sturdier. Something that I could use on all my 5” and 6” freestyle miniquad builds.

This new frame is called the Falcon.

By the time the last week of July rolled around, I had the bulk of the design work done, and I had a prototype frame cut. Before I knew it, I had parts from one of my other miniquads transplanted to the new frame, and I was out flying my prototype!

Everything went surprisingly smoothly. Often times when I design something, the parts look great on my screen, but when they’re cut, I realize the proportions are wrong or stupid. Not this time!

There are a few minor problems, but the Falcon is much closer to a release than I could have ever hoped for. Some holes need to be bigger. Some radii need to shrink by a millimeter.

Of course, I also need to crash the Falcon a whole bunch to see where it breaks!

I’ve been vlogging with the DJI Osmo Pocket

I think I’m getting better at vlogging, whether it is on the road, on location, or at home. I’m doing all three of those with the Osmo Pocket.

I’ve already written at length about the Osmo Pocket twice, so I will try to be brief.

The Pocket is fantastic. Video from the Osmo Pocket can’t exactly compete with a DSLR, but it is a certainly step up from my smartphone. The Pocket is so much lighter and so much more convenient than a real camera, and even if it isn’t lighter than your smartphone, it is definitely more comfortable to shoot with.

The Osmo Pocket most definitely has a niche, and I am a part of that niche. It is much easier to vlog when you can literally carry the video camera in your pocket. If I had to carry a Sony a6300 around, I would be in trouble, because I’d never have the camera when I need it!

My first attempt at cutting aluminum on my Shapeoko was a partial success

I have had two slabs of aluminum sitting in my office for months. I know the Shapeoko can handle aluminum, and I really wanted to try it. I just haven’t had any great ideas as to what my first experiment should be.

I decided to cut the engineer’s emblem from Team Fortress 2. Each class’s emblem is a circle inscribed with some sort of icon. The engineer’s logo is pretty simple. Just a simple wrench. That means that if I scale it up large enough, in my case that was to three inches, I wouldn’t need to learn how to do v-carving to get enough detail out of my cut.

The engraving part of the job went spectacularly well. I started too aggressively, and I did break a $2 endmill, but once I backed things off a bit, I was able to carve about 1.5mm deep into that hunk of aluminum without any issue. You can see a pattern left behind by the tool, but the parts that I milled flat are smoother to the touch than the raw surface of the extruded aluminum!

My failure was on the job that was supposed to cut the medallion free from the chunk of aluminum. The trouble is that this put the cutting tool in contact with aluminum on two sides, so there wasn’t much room to clear the chips of aluminum. The deeper I cut, the more gummed up the endmill became.

I have some ideas on how to improve this process on my next attempt!

I migrated from KeePass2 to Bitwarden

I prefer to use open source software, especially when that software performs a vital task. I consider password management to be quite vital. I’ve been using KeePass for a long time.

A few weeks ago, I learned about Bitwarden, and I am definitely late to this party. Bitwarden is an open source password management system. Just like Seafile, my favorite open-source cloud storage platform, it is easy to host your own Bitwarden server. That way, you can keep all your password vault in sync across all your devices.

Just like Seafile, you don’t have to host your own server. The Bitwarden developer offers free hosting alongside very reasonably priced paid accounts.

There are some potential downsides compared to KeePass, but the big bonus for me is the ability to share individual passwords with friends and family. This will come in handy!

Conclusion

When I had the idea to write this sort of blog post, I expected it would be quite short; maybe 200 words about three or four projects I’ve been working on. By the time my closing paragraphs are complete, I’ll likely be past 1,100 words.

What do you think? Should I keep posting these kinds of updates about once a month? Was I a bit too verbose? Should I trim things back a little next time? Let me know what you think in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with us about it!