Linux for the drones

The USB port can be a standard connect in RC planes. Make a USP driver for quad pulse channels and drive control surface with software.  Add simple USB 2.4 Ghz frequency hopper receiver. Then run all your avionics on the USB bus, via software management. Add USB gyro,GPS modules.   The larger three wire telephone jack we carry around, uselessly, except for programming and bench test.

An entire market for the millions of autonomous drones buzzing around our heads, created by deranged inventors. We cannot keep this stuff out of the hands of kids, and they mostly can afford Dollar tree foam aircraft. How does the US military protect a batch of F22s, stuck in the desert, from a swarm of Linux kernels?  Just the cost of track and destroy before they swarm the base. Your defenders drone much more costly than $500 foam aircraft. A little upgrade and the simpler foam planes can do 200 mph.  Who knew when and where those autonomous mines came from that damaged the tankers?  It is a different war, tiny mechanical intelligent flyers, and everybody has them, including non combatants.



Integrate servo control and gps and gyros onto one board, sell it for $150. Add the $75 in motor and servos, foam base, open programming.  $400 working GPS drone, minus camera. Optional USB, camera module, $20. To communicate back to base, just use the same channel hopping protocol, but add a network delivery protocol. To operate the drone, attach a USB stub Tx/RX module to your laptop. With channel hopper, the laptop can select one of a variety of active drones.

The spread spectrum is patent free, I believe. The RC hobby band has enough capability to support a megabit per second, if the total spectrum is not jammed. It has a 100 Mhz bandwidth, but we can get 2 bits per cycle at this wavelength.  So the standard frequency spread spectrum used for RC planes can be sufficient, and multiple channels allocated if needed for high resolution.  The Linux kernel can use TCP/IP just fine.

Government can require the registered thumb print for flyers, a reasonable rule to prevent the chaos of fire bombs landing everywhere. We are back to obey and protect? A remote flyers requires thumb printed license to drone, attached to the controlling owner. We already see the secure ID appearing in autos, and given they are as cheap as the thumb print detector, then they need to be in most deagerous machines.

Even large industrial equipment should come with an obey and protect, tamper proof module. The NSA gets a clue, we all have obey and protect secure ID, we can be licensed to operate dangerous machinery, large and small. We can be registered to handle sensitive data, and we can carry bearer digital pennies for direct purchase on line.