Fly like a bird

Drone Girl

I wrote to my nephew, Chris:

"In the old days Clare would walk up the wild hills with enthusiasm, if not with any substantial energy. These days, she just wishes she were a bird.

So in my imagined scenario, she gets out the car in the valley car park and settles into her camping chair. On go the VR goggles - comfortable, high-res and adjustable - and with the intuitive controller she launches the drone.

The machine is simple to fly. It automatically senses its environment and will not crash into things. It monitors its power reserves and will fly home by itself before it runs out. Ditto if it loses communications which in any case are robust.

The drone is quiet and has at least 20 minutes endurance. The cameras move in response to Clare's head movements so she has the illusion of 'being the drone'. There's a microphone and a speaker, so she could virtually accompany someone else up the hill.

The drone can be recharged from the car via an adaptor.

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So this would be a great present! I imagine we're about two or three years away from this - rather high-end - product.

What do you think? Off the top of your head, I mean, without any research."

I got a really detailed reply in just a couple of hours, but it seems my complete wish-list is still two or three years out.

There is another alternative: I could attach a pair of wireless cameras to my hat, like a pair of bunny ears. As I scampered up the hill, Clare could be 'looking through my eyes' from the comfort of home. We could even talk to one another - fancy!

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Chris suggested I look at this:

The price tag is a pretty hefty £1,000 .. but is sure to come down.

The hell of changing the router in a connected house

Today my BT Home Hub Wifi died and I entered the hell which is the installation of a new router.

I happened to have a spare BT Home Hub which I duly installed via the CD, carefully arranging not to have BT-Yahoo as my home page and not to be parasitized by the Yahoo toolbar.

My first mistake was to change the WiFi security password. The laptop immediately dropped the wireless connection and refused henceforth to recognise the router - and could not be persuaded otherwise. Trying a re-installation with the CD, it wouldn't accept my preferred password. So back to factory defaults and at least the laptop can now access the Internet.

What's easy? Mobile phones and tablets are no problem. They find the new SSID and the password is accepted no problem. Other devices are more problematic.

It seemed impossible to configure the D-Link cameras to the new router wirelessly. I have had to connect via Ethernet (in one case by dusting off my old Netgear Powerline devices).

The printer was a pain when I forgot that entering hex using UPPER CASE characters is never going to work. Eventually I did it again - properly - tapping away on the front of the printer's tiny screen.

The Sky Wireless Connector, used for iPlayer and similar, is reconfigured through the Sky Box itself and after (a) refusing to throw up the necessary screen, and (b) denying it had succeeded, it eventually worked.

It's amazing how many devices around the house are wirelessly linked to the Internet, and ludicrous that it took me two hours of messing around with diverse management interfaces to get most of these devices rehomed.

What's needed is a standard all-device management interface which is universally implemented, so that a home management system can do the whole thing once and for all. The amount of human input actually needed is zero - it should all be plug and play.