Unbalanced battery terrorism

So the 4Ah has over 90 recharges and its flight time is 14% lower. It appears one cell is the weak link. When charged in parallel, 2 cells are getting overcharged waiting for the weak cell to charge, a lethal condition. It's probably going to be charging on a battery balancer until retirement.

Considering it takes $100 of batteries to fly for 50 hours and it takes $300 of gas to drive for 50 hours, it's 1/3 as costly to fly.

Meanwhile, been trying to recover the $165 investment in Gumstix Corporation's CEO as fast as possible.

# ls -al
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Dec 31 16:01 .
drwxr-xr-x 19 root root 0 Dec 31 16:00 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 26 2006 .bash_history
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 175 Oct 26 2006 .bash_logout
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 161 Oct 26 2006 .bash_profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1711 Oct 26 2006 .bashrc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2540 Feb 22 2007 arm_copter
# ./arm_copter
Hello world
#

So the answer is yes. You can cross compile for the Gumstix, upload to the flash using zmodem, and run. It doesn't need removable storage or a
new root image every time.

Recall the embedded systems at your day job, $1500 BD players, $10,000 plasmas, $1000 cameras have always used read-only filesystems. The $165 Gumstix is quite an improvement with a writable flash filesystem.

We have serial communication between the PC, Gumstix and PIC. The next flight test requires 4 communication paths to work perfectly: the 2 serial paths and 2 radio paths. Autopilot shutdown must be tested and retested. Implementing avionics is long and hard.

The possibility of a speed governer in the avionics is intriguing. It would be much more accurate than a throttle curve and delay $350 of the TRex 600 tag. Tachometers merely probe ESC output levels.

Should be noted that an autopilot doesn't work like a human. A human compares what it sees with every possible memory and sends a memorized muscle response based on the closest image match. A computer computes a
logical muscle response from scratch for every acceleration reading.

A human initially computes logical muscle responses but falls over to its much faster comparison algorithm after memorizing enough images. Humans are the ultimate data comparators indeed, for now.