Vitals

Product: S107G Mini Gyro (Yellow) 3 Channel Mini Gyro Helicopter by Syma
Price at time of review: $24.99
Overall impression: Highly recommended, fun, easy to learn heli. A perfect toy for the home or office. A good, cheap introduction to RC flight. A great value for a very well engineered machine.

Out of the box

The heli is very small, with a main rotor (blade) diameter of between 7 and 8 inches and a body length around the same. It can charge from the remote (which requires AA batteries) or off USB (very convenient in the office.) Charging took a little shy of an hour. The heli seems to hold a charge well and even a week after putting a full charge on I was able to fly without recharging first.

This type of heli is too small for outdoor flight, but perfect for the living room or office. The controller works over infrared, like a TV remote, but unlike a TV remote it doesn’t require you to point the remote at the heli. Pleasantly, I had no trouble with reception.

Overall construction seems surprisingly solid for such an inexpensive unit. There are several metal parts in the frame, plastic parts seem well engineered and reenforced in the right places, and nearly everything is held together with screws which will make repair possible. When on, the S107G has a blinking LED on the nose. While it does seem largely decorative it gives the heli a nice visual anchor making it easy to see where you are pointed.

In the air

The controls are simple (which is good because the manual is weak at best.) The throttle (left stick on the controller) will control your height, which is a little more complicated than you might expect if you’re new to RC flight, but is easily mastered if you find some time to fly daily. Other than that the heli flies much like an RC car drives. On the right stick forward and back do what you’d expect, left and right turn the direction of the heli.

Having flown RC for years I started out easy, trying to hover a foot or two off the ground without moving forward or backward. This proved highly achievable due to the S107G’s gyroscopes which hold it solidly in position. Without any work the heli stays right in place, other than the height which you will have to get used to controlling.

If you get the hang of keeping a consistent height the hard part is done. In forward flight, the S107G flies stable and straight. The heli also stops forward flight quickly when you let off the stick, unlike it’s larger and more ‘scale’ RC cousins. Left and right turns are possible while hovering or moving forward. Any air movement in the room will immediately become evident as the heli takes on a life of it’s own near a drafty window, ceiling fan or heating vent. Be aware of these and try to avoid them when you’re getting started.

All-in-all the S107G is about as easy to fly as an RC helicopter could be. The flashing light and bright colored body aid visibility and the gyroscopes simplify flight.

The inevitable crash(es)

You will crash the S107G. It happens. I have crashed mine at least 50 times in the mere two weeks I’ve had it. Thankfully the heli seems very resilient! I have run it into walls, landed too fast, hit chairs, and even hit the main blades on the ceiling causing the heli to drop nearly 8 feet onto the hardwood floor. Each time I cringed and thought I’d be replacing parts I just turned it back upright and away it flew!

When it does eventually need parts, XenonProject.com offers replacement parts right off the product page. Parts seem very reasonably priced and most should be easy to replace.

Tips

Start with tail-in hovering – Put the heli on the ground in front of you with the tail facing you. In that orientation left is left, and right is right.

Ground effect – Any aircraft behaves differently near the ground than it will further up in the air. You will find that the S107G is a lot more stable when you get it at least 1 foot off the ground, so make that an early goal.

If you’re considering a larger RC heli get one like this to learn a little first. Each model will fly differently, but one of the biggest challenges for folks new to RC is getting used to the orientation. When the heli (or a plane, or car) is facing you the controls for left and right will appear reversed. Getting used to that on an inexpensive unit will save you money and downtime when you start flying more expensive helis.

If you’re the type who can’t stand not having your toys, I’d suggest buying an extra set of main blades. They are the only part on mine that is showing some wear, but even after dozens of flights I’m still going on my original set.

Now where is my reciprocation dingle-arm?

via ssrfanatic.com

The wrong way to drink your coffee

via Oddly Specific (a new favorite)

Here’s what J. Westergaard “Oracle DBA” says about Oracle Shell Scripting:

I found this to be a good book. It was a quick and easy read, I read the whole thing in about a week. The subject matter was a bit simpler then I had expected, yet it filled in some of the basic details that the more advanced books just skip over. This is was a great book for beginning unix shell scripting.

J. highlights one of the books biggest strengths: it presents as complete a picture as possible of basic yet powerful shell scripting commands. Thanks J!

Check out my book Oracle Shell Scripting, only $34.95 from Rampant TechPress.

Buy it now!

For the past few weeks I’ve been busy with an on-site visit to one of my favorite clients in Maryland, a database health-check for another client (which makes for a quite demanding week) and some much needed vacation. The highlight of the past few weeks (other than having some great time off with my family and friends) was being presented an Oracle ACE award.

I have quite a backlog of topics to write about and will be working on getting a few articles up here each week as soon as I can find the time. For now I’m off to San Diego, CA for a conference, as soon as it stops snowing long enough to get a flight out of New Hampshire.

Happy new year everyone!

Art MoCo offers some explanation of why the artist Adriana Bertini creates these amazing dresses:

The Brazilian artist started creating fashions out of condoms to highlight the need to look at the prophylactics as basics, so that we would don them as easily as a pair of jeans. Some of her dresses use thousands of condoms; one wedding dress took almost 80,000 (and to think, some people hesitate over using just one!).

condom, sex, safe sex, birth control, prophylactic

This of course applies not only to programmers, but sys-admins and DBAs as well. I mean really, some of those Oracle installs take a long time!

slacker, technology, compile, programming, code, excuse

How cold? -34.8F Yeah, that’s cold.

The video was done earlier today by the Mount Washington Observatory Staff. The observatory is like a fallout shelter on the top of the mountain with some weather gear strapped on top. The staff has been known to do some wacky videos before, but it’ll be a lot more fun now that they’re posting them online.

Check out Water to Snow Round 1 which was done at a mere 22 below but with the aid of a 75MPH wind! It’s probably worth mentioning that Mount Washington is the location of the strongest wind gust ever recorded at a hasty 231MPH.

snow, mount washington, mt washington, new hampshire, nh, weather

Andy C posted a short history of Oracle blogging about a year ago. It seems there were a lot fewer back then.

Check out the whole list. There are some great folks on here, many of whom actually post primarily about Oracle!

oracle, database, dba, rdbms, blog

Now lets, just for a moment, review the definition of the word “hoax“. Now, if you read it carefully you’ll notice it starts off “to trick…” The phrase “to trick”, at least to me, implies intent. If you’re paying any attention to the reasons these guys (and folks like them in other US cities) put the devices up and what their purpose was you know already that there was no “trick”.

But anyway, while the press is busy sensationalizing the whole incident, the two men are taking time to learn a bit about hair styles of the ’70s! Really! Click through and watch the video. Bravo to these guys for not feeding the media machine!

Get these guys for graffiti, maybe even trespassing; even disorderly conduct, but they’re not terrorists. Now, Turner Broadcasting and the ad agency they hired that came up with the idea have a bit more to answer for, although the campaign was received quite differently in other cities. If they had any brains at all they’d have walked into Boston today with an apology and a million dollar check.

The MAKE blog (where I stole the image from, hope they don’t mind) continues to have some interesting information on the event.

publicity, graffiti, prank, led, technology, cool