"Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired" wrote in message
news:rhLVd.21112$Sn6.10965@lakeread03...
The hard part is the electronics package between the two.

It wouldn't be that bad, really. At least not for just a rate damper. The
R/C gyros put out pulse-width modulation signals, which are pretty easy to
work with. Also, there are a lot of decent servos out there that can read
it.

I think the hard part of the rate damper project is making sure you don't
overtorque something important in your airplane, and setting things up so
that, when the damper servo goes haywire, that you can turn it off and
revert to a normal airplane quickly and without hurting anything/anybody,
and that while you're busy figuring out that something is going wrong, that
you can overpower anything it's doing that you don't like.

More than a few people and quite a few airplanes have gotten killed in the
process of engineers trying to figure out how to do all this automatic
stabilization and fly-by-wire stuff. It's not something approached casually,
unless it's for a toy that's OK to crash (R/C model). In my somewhat short
career as a flight controls engineer (12 years), I've seen 3 airplanes lost
and more than a couple of close calls due to control design issues. Even
when everything works as designed, there are man-machine interaction
problems that can kill you. Even apparently innocuous things. Think back to
that Airbus that busted up a couple of years ago in New York. I think
there's an article in Flying this month about it. Nothing there that jumps
out at you as an obvious hazard, but it got a couple hundred people real
dead.

I'd really hate to see someone on this newsgroup go out and get himself
killed trying to invent something without full cognizance of the hazards.

Pete