Bill Daniels wrote:

I'm not sure what you are
suggesting though, that I am undermining the commercial glidersoftware
business?
Nope, just pointing out that it's likely to be a labor of love rather than
a
serious effort to get rich. Nothing wrong with getting paid for your
work.
I didn't start this project to get rich. I like OpenSource. That concept has
allready made Cumulus far better than I had ever been able to make myself,
because we now have a number of contributors and we are free to use code
from other GPL projects. Cumulus will always remain OpenSource. So yes, It
is a labor of love. Nothing wrong with that either, is there?

Problem is: these devices a
-too powerhungry
-too hard to install in a cockpit.
Really? I see systems that pull less than 750ma. That would go for more
than 8 hours on a 7.5AH battery. Spend a little more for a Li-Ion polymer
battery and 10 - 15 hours are possible. The systems are about the same
size
as a CD drive (5.5 inch form factor). I've got plenty of room for that
and
the battery. As for the screen, I have dry-fitted a 15" screen over my
panel and I have room to spare. It just needs to hinge at the top so I
can flip it up out of the way if I need to see the old round gauges.
And how much power does your (touch) screen draw? I would be really
interested to see such a setup, and I must say I find the concept
intreaging. Maybe you can fit, say, a 10" screen in your pannel. That would
allready be a huge improvement over a PDA screen, and I must say that the
additional CPU power of an x86-based system would give some *very* nice
options indeed...

I am working on an application called Cumulus on the PDA platform. But,
it's
easy to port to x86. In fact, most of the development work is done on
x86.

I read your web page and I'm really impressed. Waaay cool!
Thanks. The webpage is a bit outdated, and the screenshots are pretty old...
Stuff looks better now, and 1.2 will be a lot cooler feature-wise :-)

André