More years than I care to admit to ago,
we had a device on the PC that was probably the forerunner of the Arduino (the builder always scraped the chip ID off) which then had an external connect to a whole range of boards, for things like 7 segment displays, rotary controls, switches, single point digital outputs for things like lights, or solenoids, and eventually even low power stepper motors, the board had it's own programming language, and was then able to communicate with the PC via normal programming and also via the game port concept, it gave us up to 16 analog channels that we could use compared to the normal 4 of a game port. This was all pre USB, pre PCI even, a good old fashioned ISA card, and one of the things that killed it was when the motherboards no longer had the slot to take it. The same concept for extensions could work here as well.As I've commented to someone else today, the only difference between the cutting edge and the bleeding edge is the pressure applied .
Some of the things I'm looking at are a cross over to the sort of work that's being done with Ardupilot, and we're already on the fringes of that, the advantage here is that the ERSky board has the potential to be able to deal with some of this, while the Stock board is close to its limits, so I guess I'm looking at ways to make the ERsky board even more attractive, which has to be in all of our interests, in that it will ensure ongoing support and availability for the future.
