On Monday, April 18, 2016 at 2:48:16 AM UTC-7, Bruce Hoult wrote:
PCBs are easy. I can put you onto a friend who designs PCBs at home in Dunedin, gets them made in China cheap. He even has a small pick-and-place machine at home for production runs up to a few hundred or low thousands of units.

I do embedded software and know enough about digital logic design to get into trouble, but design of a proper PCB (or analog circuitry) is beyond me. It is getting quite easy to cobble together sophisticated devices on a breadboard.

The hard part is the software to filter and calibrate and interpret the signals. It'd take a few hours of flying, recording the signals, and comparing to a known accurate AOA measurement method (e.g. a decent sized vane on a stick out in the freestream)

I'm not so sure one needs an accurate absolute numeric AoA, so much as a repeatable measure of how close you are to stall AoA. Such a system would need to be calibrated for each glider installation by going up and stalling in various configurations. I have some practical experience on the filtering side, including working with another poster is this group to build a flight computer with digitally differentiated variometer about a decade ago (when there was more of a need for analog circuitry). We did hours of flying (and driving fast up/down steep hills), before we managed to get the filtering right.