[sgtnoodle]

Horribly inefficient code is a wonderful thing at a small scale. The faster you solve your problem, the sooner you can solve the next problem.

I once threw together a mylar balloon helium blimp in the shape of a Dragon space capsule. My goal was to fly it over the cafeteria crowd at SpaceX during the C2 launch. For control, I used the PCB of a travel wifi router. I soldered three small DC motors to its LED outputs. The embedded software consisted of something like:

nc -l -u -p 10000 | bash

I then connected my laptop to the access point and ran a python script that would send UDP packets containing shell commands to toggle the LED GPIO pins based on arrow keypresses.

The crowd really enjoyed the novelty. After the excitement was over, I flew it around some more in the cafeteria. Elon Musk walked up to it floating in the air, paused for a few seconds, then looked around the room trying to find the operator. I was just like any other employee hanging out at a table casually typing on my laptop, though.

Good times. On my last day there I still had a helium tank under my desk. So, I filled up a life-sized Elmo balloon (a left over prototype), then let it float up into the rafters of the office. It was presumably up there for a month or two.

[selcuka]

> For control, I used the PCB of a travel wifi router. I soldered three small DC motors to its LED outputs. The embedded software consisted of something like:

> nc -l -u -p 10000 | bash

That's a neat idea. Did you have to flash it with a custom firmware or do they typically come with netcat etc installed?

[sgtnoodle]

The router had openWRT support. Once I flashed that on, it had minimal versions of all the usual cli tools through BusyBox.