Picking a Project

Hello There!  I've been looking for a project for a while, but I've been struggling to come up with something. I batted around a number of ideas that have ranged from everything from programming up some back-end databases to building an electric car to learning to fly.

My previous projects have mainly been on the software side.  I developed a football ranking and score prediction algorithms, which can be found at CSSportsRank and CSSportsRank: Predictions.  I also developed a tool for doing performance reviews called TinyEval.  However, I've been looking for something that is on the hardware side, but that I could still use my programming knowledge for.  I also want it to be something that will challenge me, but won't break my budget or suck up every minute of my free time.

What to do, what to do?  I had looked at building a car or electric car, and I love a company called Factory Five.  They make some awesome ground up kit cars, but at the end of the day that would probably have been a $40-50k project - and it would have required a lot of garage space, which is something that I don't have.  The electric car conversion is something I probably could have done for under $10k, but once again I needed space that I didn't have.

Syma 107G with phone for scale

Then Christmas came around.  I'm 34 years old and much to my surprise my parents gave me a Syma 107G RC helicopter.  You can pick one of these up at a mall kiosk or at Amazon for about $20.  I can't stress enough how insanely fun these little things are.  They are also relatively durable as I crash it about 3 times every flight and flights are only about 6 minutes long.  I'd definitely advise you to get one.  Either way, this little baby (video below) gave me the idea for what I wanted to do as my next project.  I wanted to build something bigger.

So, with that I decided to do something RC related.