Orion Drones

Community

Six-week drone coaching program

I am working as a volunteer ‘drone coach’ for disadvantaged children for the next six weeks with a local community development center called Verticals operated by a local organizers, William James, an inspiring and dedicated leader among them. Mr. James is taking a vision for youth development to the next level by offering exploration activities ranging from sports competition to 3D printing. I have been involved for a few months with brainstorming, and I am anxious to meet the kids to see what they know already. We are going to use a DJI platform to combine drones and rovers in exciting learning experiences. DJI is practically a standard bearer for conventional remote sensing capabilities.

Prizes! Woo hoo! The learning sessions culminate in games. I have tried to write about what that means to me for the past two hours, but profound thoughts and connections keep altering the direction of this newsletter. I could write all day about game because I love to play, to build toys, to explore games, and because I studied the historical and spiritual significance of games among people who never developed a written language. Reasoning about why play feels good does not replace play. Money does not replace food. Dollars taste really nasty. Nourishment of the mind and the body is wealth.

We want to give kids a greater awareness of cool technology, to inspire them, our leaders unaware, our future.

In place of the inarticulate cohesion of mere stuff we find the articulate cohesion of inseparably interconnected patterns

Alan Watts on the interplay of reason and sensing

So, we want to elevate a history of our community. We have time. Community development in such a small and shattered place (relatively speaking in terms of other US locations) matters most to people who show up to get a piece of the action.

Recent Explorations

Toys will be toy

I am building a bunch of toys for kids. I have to assemble and sometimes configure them to participate in a network. The hobby has greatly improved my soldering. That’s why my second drone passed continuity and smoke tests while the first one basically caught fire and now hangs on my wall like a certificate of merit. Try, try again.

Over the winter break, I will be exploring a programming platform for robotics. Programming is basically free learning, and I want to teach this DIY assistant to respond to custom loops. Last weekend, I explored alternative conversion software so I could do all the sound engineering in one package: record, edit, export, but I ran into some issues, so I will work on this catch-as-catch-can.

Study

Nerd Out

Light generated from positively charged ions almost colliding in a particle accelerator can convert into matter. Everything that follows is anticlimactic.

I am studying for a PE exam for electrical and computer engineering. The toy-making and such is just another way to share the work that continues with or without me. Between the aforementioned research paper and the PE exam, I have very little time to do much else through October. In fact, I already created my Halloween costume.

Business Accounting

The nuts and bolts of any successful business relies on prior analysis and methods of accounting that are appropriate to type and scale of services or products offered, or luck, or both, or neither. If that helps. Beyond the formula, again, is people, and the ability to move them towards a goal that, if not the original product/service, an outcome of adaptation to a history of production. Whatever the characters were doing on The Walking Dead before the zombification of the world they inhabit, they all learn to attack zombie brains. Survival is not a job, maybe not even a choice. According to theories in abiogenesis, maybe the distinction is not crucial, and there are just different forms and levels of sentience. There remains death and taxes, and crows surfing.