"no, i've been testing with the 5v. it's a bad idea, but nobody else had mentioned having problems.

i dropped the speed in twi.h from 400000 to 300000 and it seems to be working now. maybe it's just flaky when overpowered."

"Anyone having trouble getting the boarduino working with the nunchuck accelerometer? The example code just hangs during the nunchuck_init function for me."

"Good point. I suppose you could do something like have the flight controller output serial to a servo motor controller, and then take that into the fail-safe switch. You'd be trading additional weight and circuit complexity for the software…"

"Yeah, I'm thinking if you loose power, you're probably dead anyway. You could loose power to the radio electronics or to a servo too. I don't know if it's valid, but my main worry is the software using the same chip for control switching that's…"

"What are your thoughts on using a separate microcontroller with the sole purpose of switching input and monitoring battery life or other critical events (maybe radio signal)? The routine can be simple enough to be trusted, and you can fit the whole…"

"I guess what I was thinking is that you could somehow clip off the low and high end of the output and just quantize the middle. Essentially, you'd turn it into a +-200 deg/sec range device and toss away the rest. It's the same thing you'd get with a…"

"So what if you set the arduino to look for voltages up to something like 1.7v (assumption: does anything above that just clip?).

Now you have a range of 0.5v to 1.7v, with 1.5v being the center. The arduino can detect 1.66 deg/s of rotation with a…"

"Is there a common amplifier IC that converts 3.3v to 5v? 3 of those ADXRS300s are going to be expensive :("

"Thanks for the reply and the Tom Pycke link. The importance of the gyro measurement is becoming more clear to me now. I'm wondering now, on top of detecting roll/pitch, could you use long term averaging of the accelerometers to also control for…"

"Nice work!

Have you experimented with using the accelerometer data alone, but averaging the samples over time, only allowing each reading to contribute to some percentage of the estimated measurement?"

"Chris,

I'll have to look into the newer Stamp hardware, especially since I've gotten familiar with coding for the platform. That said, the cost of the Arduino is pretty compelling.

If more power and memory is needed, I was thinking the best thing…"

"Chris,

At what frequency are the NMEA sentences output by the EM406 versus the time it takes to poll the Parallax GPS module?

This is probably a naive question, but I'm only familiar with interfacing with an old Garmin 12. Without multi-threading…"

"I've made a GPS waypoint guided RC car in the past with a BS2 and I recall having to really whittle things down in order to get the code to fit in the Stamp's memory footprint. Depending on what other routines I had running in the service loop, I…"