Over the past few summers I’ve been learning how to fly RC airplanes and have been fairly successful at them being able to land an RC plane on the water and fly from our pontoon boat while cruising around the lake. The end goal for the RC planes is to be doing UAV’s. The platform is nearly complete as I have all the components and just need to take that leap of faith and program the arduino with a mission plan. While I work up the confidence in my build I decided to get an RC truck (I’ve owned 4 different ones, still have an electric and nitro Traxxas Stampede) that could be used as an urban rover. I picked up a Traxxas Summit because of some of the features it has such as: remote 2 speed transmission, remote locking front and rear differentials, 4 wheel drive, and size. This truck is huge, it’s a 1/10 scale RC truck. It has a 16″ or so wheel span with an overall length of almost 2′. The larger the vehicle the more stable the video feed is going to be. I coupled this truck with a 2.4GHz Futaba 7C RC transmitter.

But now for the fun stuff. Driving the RC truck using LOS (line of sight) is one thing, but how about driving it around the block from my deck? 900MHz video down-link to the rescue. I’m using a 500mW transmitter on the truck with a small camera mounted to a pan/tilt assembly so I can freely move the camera 180 degrees left right and close to 180 degrees up and down. This video stream is received by my ground station box that houses a 7″ LCD monitor and HP mini (this is more for the UAV to do mission control from). The ground station also has connections for video goggles for complete immersion into the FPV concept. While using the goggles I can’t see anything else other than what the camera sees. Mounted in the goggles is a head tracker which when enabled will control the pan/tilt servos moving the camera where I look.

Whenever I start roaming around the neighborhood with this people come out of their garages and try to figure out where the person controlling the truck is. I’ve managed to go around both halves (block divided by alley) of our block with a little bit of video distortion. I’m looking for some old Tonka truck bodies so I can modify one to hold the camera and everything inside the truck instead of on top of it like I have it. I’m also looking to add bi-directional audio and maybe an ipod shuffle for music.

We currently have a mixture of just about all Sonos components, only items missing are a CR200 touchscreen controller and an S5 ZonePlayer (hopefully coming soon to our new master bathroom!), the Sonos iPad is a nice addition. When we first bought our Sonos system almost 3 years ago we had only the CR100 controllers to use (3 of them in the house) and it worked well. The nice thing about the Sonos hardware remotes is that they use the SonosNet wireless mesh network and do not need a secondary full coverage wireless network to operate. However the CR100 did have some downfalls, not being a touchscreen was a major one. The CR200 fixed that and brought to the table a vivid color display. We chose to skip this remote in favor of our iPhones. While the interface on the iPhones was nice it was small and didn’t lend itself to fully displaying different information points at the same time.

This is were the iPad app shines. The design is based off of three columns on the main music screen. One column for zones, one for the currently selected zone(group), and one for your music library. Grouping zones is simple to do by clicking the “Group” icon next to a zone and select which zones should be in that group. Don’t like the music you are listening to? Easy, just find your music through your local library or any of the many online services, then drag and drop it onto  your middle pane to play on the currently selected zone group. The larger screen works great for Sonos and the developers have fully utilized all the space given to them.

If you own a Sonos system and own an iPad you do not want to miss out on this combination. I guarantee you will be much more satisfied with how you utilize your Sonos system using this combination than you would ever be with another product like Logitech’s Squeezebox.

See below for some pictures of the Sonos iPad app in action on our Sonos system.

Please note I am not affiliated with Sonos in any shape or form nor have I received any monetary or other reimbursement for this review. I am simply a tech geek that loves his Sonos system.

Apple announced the iPad today at their keynote after a long period of rumors with some of them coming true, and a lot of key ones not. Being an Apple stockholder I was very interested in seeing what was going to be announced today and so far I’m still on the fence. Really this is just a large iPhone / iPod Touch missing some components.

Let’s look at some of the technical specs that set it apart from the iPhone / iPod Touch:

Size and weight

Display

• 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology
• 1024-by-768-pixel resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi)
• Fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating
• Support for display of multiple languages and characters simultaneously

Capacity

• 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB flash drive

Processor

• 1GHz Apple A4 custom-designed, high-performance, low-power system-on-a-chip

TV and Video

• Support for 1024 x 768 with Dock Connector to VGA adapter; 576p and 480p with Apple Component A/V Cable, 576i and 480i with Apple Composite Cable

Battery and Power

• Built-in 25Whr rechargeable lithium-polymer battery
• Up to 10 hours of surfing the web on Wi-Fi, watching video, or listening to music
• Charging via power adapter or USB to computer system

Let’s talk first about my major cons:

First off, 64GB is the max capacity in this device? A device like this needs at least double that to be useful. I want to be able to have a lot of my music, movies, and TV shows as well as iTunes U material loaded on this device.

Second, where’s the camera?!? A device like this cries out for iChat with Video Conferencing.

Third, no multitasking? The iPod audio player on the iPad at least needs to be enhanced to support Internet Radio sources as well as others such as Pandora so we can stream our music in the background while doing other things on the iPad.

Fourth, no handwriting input mode. This would make a great portable electronic notebook for meetings.

So what do I actually like about the iPad and think will work well?

I like the keyboard dock accessory, I think this is a great step towards an idea of having the old school mainframe computers or a personal “Citrix” like environment. You take the iPad on a trip with you and launch your MobileMe Back to My Mac application (hint hint Apple, develop one!) which connects you to your Apple laptop or desktop running at your house.

I like the Mail, Contacts, and Calendaring applications. As well as the iBooks application. These all show off the benefit of having a much larger screen size. The new iWork applications as well show how this device could be used in the Enterprise world, something that the iPhone / iPod Touch hasn’t completely been able to do yet. What will make the iWork Keynote application killer is a hardware component for the dock connector that can connect to a VGA converter box without wires for a portable presentation machine.

Ultimately will I run out and buy one when it is released in April (WiFi only in March, I would want a 3G capable devie)? Probably not. Not only will the misses kill me if I spend that much on another computer, but I just don’t think I could fully utilize the device for the cost without my cons being fixed. Now if someone were so gracious to send one my way of course I would accept that! For now, I’ll be happy with my iPhone 3Gs and MacBook Pro for mobile computing.

I’m finding that the S5 works great for bathrooms and bedrooms where you don’t want to have to have a ZP120 and speakers setup due to space constraints. In our main bathroom we currently have a ZP120 with two Polk Audio bookshelf speakers. While this setup works it isn’t the most visually appealing setup. When this setup is replaced by a Sonos S5 you can see the difference made by using an all in one solution.

But the real benefit of the Sonos S5 is how portable it is and how you could easily bring it from one location to another. The Sonos S5 features a built-in carry handle to make this process easier, however, I would much rather see a nice fitted and padded bag to carry the S5 along with the power cable and a CR-200 for easier movement between locations. I could see us using the Sonos S5 up at our parents cabin where we tend to try to string extension cords and boomboxes all over during our annual cabin party weekend. Next year we’ll be able to simply bring a S5 and a BR-100 to the cabin and provide music around the yard while we sit at the campfire or play bags.

There are a few features on the S5 that I would like to see, one of them being a cradle for the CR-200 (even though we don’t own any, I would find it useful if we did!), another being more integrated controls for at least starting / stopping music that you have selected from one of the controllers. Often we leave our Sonos sytems on regular channels, our bedroom is typically on Sirius 61 Highway, the garage and my office are typically on Sirius 36 BPM or Energy98. If there are items in the queue a quick play button would be great for a “headless” setup.

One feature I’m glad is not on the S5 is an iPhone/iPod dock. I’ll be the first to stand up for Apple products and how well they are built, but the Sonos S5 to me is not an iPod speaker dock system. I don’t want the Sonos S5 to be tied to a dock connector for input or have the beautiful aesthetics impaired by a dock that only a small fraction of users are going to use. The Sonos concept for music playing requires the use of one of their controllers to really control the playback, not a third-party device. I also find that any music I could access on my iPhone I can access via the Sonos (Pandora, Sirius, Internet Radio, local music).

Overall though I am very pleased with the build and sound quality of the S5. I don’t expect it to compete with my ZP90 hooked up to a Denon A/V receiver with Bose speakers, I expect it to compete with my Klipsch dock speakers for my iPod. When the two are pitted against each other the S5 sounds much better and I have a much larger selection of music to choose from.

The N800 is pretty sweet, my Dell Axim broke so I was able to get the N800 from Dell. So far I have Gizmo running on it alongside Google Talk for IM/VoIP, Kismet for wireless security audits, Canola for UPnP media streaming, and Carman which I need to get an OBDII connector so I can read codes off of the cars. I just need to find some good note taking software and get a bluetooth keyboard and it will be the perfect note taker. The N800 is extremely small, it looks large in the photos, but when you actually have it in your hands it is nice and small. I’d also like to look at the NAVKIT for the N800 and see how well of a job that does with GPS navigation.

Now the Xbox 360 has a story with it also, I won it at our IT conference from Dell. At first we were thinking I may not even keep it, but we decided that I would. So I unpacked it and got it all setup the other night to find out that the wireless controller is busted! Not having any controllers (or games even) I was just going to see how well of a media streamer it was, but I guess I can’t do that now! I called M$ do get it replaced and they expect me to pay to ship the controller back to them so they can see if it is broken or not!! How lame is that? I have to spend money to get it fixed. Hopefully our Dell rep will be able to get me a replacement, otherwise, eBay here it comes!