Fighting the AOA War
I'm consistently amazed that the amount discussion and, frankly, push-back on the necessity to embrace AOA in general aviation. To me, it's a simple technological advance, no different than adding brakes to airplanes and paving runways; but bring it up in discussion at the bar, and 15 pilots will have 15 different opinions (informed or not) on it's usefulness. That type of discussion is healthy, but suprising based on successful military experience. The "Great Divide" refers to a (mis)perceived wall between military and general aviation. While there are significant differences between the communities, some military lessons are directly applicable; and the military uses general aviation to screen pilot candidates. There isn't really a demarkation between various aviation communities, only walls that folks choose to errect.
V4 Update
Progress has been slow making the transition away from the now non-available Teensy 3.6 as some of our volunteers have pursued other priorites. Such is the nature of volunteer groups! We've done great work, and I really appreciate all of the effort folks have contributed to the project to get us here. Switching to the ESP32 RTOS "engine" has required a complete overhaul of the code. We have an excellent hardware design (Thanks Phil!), but haven't been able to develop the required the code; so Bob has stepped up to the plate to move the project off top-dead-center by creating a "drop in" replacement board for the RV-4 similar to the new circuit design that Phil has developed for us. Bob is re-writing the code for the new hardware which includes "off board" sound processing. This isn't a small project. We are sticking the Arduino IDE for this test hardware and are calling this test article the "V4B," B for Bob :). This hardware will allow us to expidite flight testing without having to make any wiring changes to the RV-4 and RV-8 test airplanes--brilliant. The software also retains all of the data integration we currently enjoy with V3. It also is keeping with the orginal Heathkit spirit of the project insofar it's made of obtainium and can be assembled by folks interested in building their own hardware. We hope to be able to wring out the new software (the 800 pound gorilla in the room) by Spring.
You'll notice that we've moved some components to the bottom of the board (Figure 2). The fact that the new board will simply slip into the existing box in the RV-4 is perfect for the stick monkey that is always electrically (and software) challenged! You'll notice that the test board utilizes the same back plate, DSUB-15 and 1/4" quick releases as previous V2/V3 hardware. We simply canibalized some old hardware to do this.
