I've been working on a piece of hardware that communicates with an iOS app. It has a display, and using it takes up some space. I made a little demo video of it last night (not yet for public consumption), trying to fit the iPhone, hardware, and associated hardware all in the frame. The result was a video in which the iPhone's screen was hard to see.

I was thinking it would be nice to use picture-in-picture to provide a closeup of my device's display, and the iPhone's screen, but I only have two cameras. It occurred to me that the iPhone supports displaying its screen on an external display, maybe there was a way to record that. A little Googling turned up the answer.

Thanks to this article by Sylvain Gauchet, I learned about the Reflection OS X app ($15 as of this writing). This is one of those delightful apps that does exactly what you need it to do, without breaking the bank (actually, I would've paid triple the price for it).

Reflection turns your Mac (or PC) into an AirPlay target. Your iPhone 4S, iPad 2, or iPad 3 can send their screen output to the Mac. Reflection gives you the option to record the video. It works incredibly well, and it's wireless (no need for the Apple video output cabling).

I was even able to use iChat desktop sharing to demo Reflection to a friend.

Go check out Reflection today. You can try it free for 10 minutes (and only 10 minutes; not 10 minutes each time you launch). But it's only $15.

This was my first trip to Europe, and I was blown away by the rail transit system. Prior to this trip, my experience with rail outside the US was in Sydney, Australia. Not bad there, but Germany’s is better.

I've made a handful of PCBs, using Osmond on Mac OS X. This is the latest (click on the images for larger versions):

One of my concerns is that my solder mask is so far away from all the pads and holes. On this board, you can see how each side of the TQFP44 part (U1) has no solder mask in between pads. Many of the pads easily lift off the substrate when touched with the soldering iron.

Here's an example of a board where the mask seems to go all the way onto the pads (and between them):

Obviously, I have some spacing set a certain way in Osmond, but I don't know if that's required, or if I should be doing things differently.

We had several successes this weekend, with longer-range flights. We flew the small wing out 2 km, and it successfully returned and landed. A couple days later, we flew out to 3 km. We started to lose telemetry at that range with the rubber ducky antenna, but the plane flew without trouble. Here's a video of a successful flight with autoland:

The wing above is the red one in this photo. The new wing is the black one:

The new wing will use an E-flight Power 32 motor, shown here on the test stand:

New UAV Parts

I had a flurry of buying activity this weekend, after seeing the new wing. The thing is huge: 2.1 m. I decided to build one, too. The wing it self will take the longest to arrive, some time next week, but I ordered everything else in the mean time, which should arrive before the weekend.

Here’s the list of stuff:

This just hit my inbox:

From: Anton S. [mailto:xxx@yyy.com]
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 9:42 AM
To: dept@yyyy.com
Subject: Anton WFH Today

There was a shooting Saturday night in SF where my car was parked. When I was walking to my car I got hit by a ricochet bullet. Luckily it hit the side of my neck and didn’t enter the body (just a flesh wound). I am fully functional, but my neck is a little sore. Working from home today.

Related local news links
http://www.ktvu.com/news/29005645/detail.html
http://www.sfexaminer.com/blogs/law-and-disorder/2011/08/two-wounded-san-francisco-soma-shooting-early-sunday-morning

-Anton