deviationTx foundation?

The outage that started yesterday makes me think it's time to put forward an idea I've had in the back of my mind for a while now: setting up a non-profit whose primary function would be to deal with such issues.

The idea is that the foundation would be tasked with promoting the use and development of deviationTx. It would manage the domain names and any hosted sites, and act as a project manager of sorts for deviationTx team that already exists.

Unlike PBR, it would accept donations. Those would be used to pay for the fees involved in running those sites. Other activities might be helping people get deviated Tx's: bulk orders of the modules, for instance. Finding someone to install them if people wanted to provide a Tx and donate their time.

It could also do things to promote deviationTx: people have asked about neck straps, so a bulk purchase of deviationTx might be possible. Or arranging to get a deviated Tx into the hands of a reviewer. Or anything else that falls under the title of "promoting the use of deviationTx".

It could also use that money to help developers. For instance, the universal board that PBR has been designing - it could reimburse suitable developers for the purchase of that. Possibly even PBR, though I understand why he won't take money. Even setup up a feature/bug bounty system of sorts.

Nothing beyond managing the domains and web sites is guaranteed, and other things are possible. I'm just blue-skying what such an entity could do.

Registering a non-profit usually requires three officers. PBR would of course be an officer (borrowing Guido's title of "benevolent dictator for life"), but wouldn't count as one of the three. As far as I'm concerned, each of the three would have to have at least one alternate who could deal with things if the officer was missing, because - well, we want to avoid outages like this.

So, how many people think this is a good enough idea to donate money to such an organization? How about donating time to being an officer?

Final note: the outage seems to have been caused by the deviationTx.com hosting company doing some kind of migration. I chased them down, opened a ticket and gave them a call, and was told it would get fixed. Not sure that was why it got fixed, but at least it got fixed.

In general this sounds like a good idea. Certainly to keep the website up and administered. I'd be happy to contribute money; time is in shorter supply.

The idea of promoting the use of deviation is not clear to me. Not an evangelist myself, but happy to help people who come looking. I'm also hesitant to mod other peoples radios in case there are liability issues (just don't know).

I'd also sent an email to the hosting company's support address, but got back a note a ticket was not opened since they didn't know my email address. Before I could pursue further the site was back up. Thanks!

You can open a ticket with the hosting company by sending a note to the sales address. I called them to actually get some action. But they aren't very happy about customers of their customers opening tickets.

Money would be welcome, but until at least two other people volunteer to be officers (we need a president, secretary and treasurer), it won't go anywhere.

Promotion doesn't have to include selling modded radios. Stocking modules would be a big help for a lot of people. Selling neck straps, etc. would also qualify as promotion. And yeah, selling modded radios may have liability issues, as well as requiring FCC certification. Checking on such would be part of the foundations job. Actually, thinking of things they can do to promote use and then sorting through the legal issues is part of their job. But dealing with the web site and team deviationTx would be the first priority.

Has anyone been in contact with PB? It would be good to know how he feels about all of this, and whether his break is temporary or permanent. You really have done a lot to keep the project alive in his absence and I want to be clear that I'm not devaluing that effort, but I'd hate to see that be a reason for him not to come back.

Nobody has talked to PBR that I know of. And I agree - I don't want to do anything that might keep him from returning. I want to be perfectly clear that what I'm doing has no other goal than to keep deviationTx moving forward until he comes back. So if there's no community support for something, I won't push it by myself, as that wouldn't really be moving things forward.

I hope that when he comes back, he'll adopt whatever infrastructure we've set up to provide support for the project should he need to take time off again. But the project is still his no matter what. If he wants this stuff gone, it'll go away. If he wants to use it but thinks there are things we're doing but shouldn't, we'll stop. Conversely, if he thinks there are things we aren't doing but should, we'll start.

The first thing I did when I created the deviationT team was make PBR an admin. I expect to do something similar if we do set up such a foundation.

I found yet another thing the foundation could do that we (as individuals) can't. I just signed up as a possible mentor for the Google Summer of Code project. If we had a foundation, we could get Google to pay a student to develop code for deviation!

But there doesn't appear to be enough support for this idea.

Idea is good that people can donate.

Myself I only see deviation become a huge DIY radio community, when it becomes fully open source, which means not any longer strictly made for Walkera devices.

I hope some time we can connect the universal TX module, to a standard ARM development board, such as raperry pi etc, there are many platforms readily and cheaply available (decesiion to be made). Wire your pots and switches into any Transmittter of choice or enclosure you like. We could expect some very creative TX developments and if we use a powerfull board with many IO, features are only limited by software.

If deviation, can attract more contenders and universities robotics students etc, then could become big!

Yup fully agree, I am not a software developer myself, apart for some basic stuff like arduino etc. So all full credits to you guys!

Indeed a cortex board etc fine with me, there are plenty of available stuff, but I am sure you guys know best what to use, if this will come some day, I hope we take a very top notch card, which can stay for many years! Standard availble and really future proof, given all IO and possibilities we would ever need. inc audio and mems bluetooth embeded.
Using a standard board, means no pcb to manufacture, so eveybody can join, with simple means.

Maybe the future TX , looks completely different? Running devaition on a Cortex board give people creativity, people will step into it as no longer they need to buy a Devo radio.

I would love to see new "out of the box" ideas to develop, wich will happen automatically if more people join the commuity. I beleive currently with the drone hype this is just at the beginning of what will come. There are so many endless posibilities, to do with RC controls, MEMS, vibrators, audio feedback, telemetry, implementations of head trackers, autopilots, obstacle avoidence etc, etc. Also there are so many modules sensor etc, you can buy now days cheaply.
What we see now allready starting, is configuring settings from the TX over telemetry, adjust the esc parametrs also get telemetry data directly form the esc and flight controller. Setup and adjust flight controllers pids etc from the TX, so many more will change RC coming years....

I expect there to be a huge RC community who really like to get the best platform and willing to drill some holes in his tx to put additional switches, meters etc, put a board in and if it can talk many protocols as deviation, it is ideal Tx!. I beleive it is part of the hobby to build and expriment a TX in the way you like it? Also what is very clear is that, open source is being well accepted and even manufacturars are starting to go that way, examples many esc's run blheli/simon K from factury, open Tx tx like taranis etc.
So it is changing and getting accepted at the field, that you not run a stock Futaba......

I expect the community to come by itself when platform will be more open than it is now. And when many people using Deviation, there might be manufacturars, who will step in and build a tx with running that......

I thought about using a SBC for development purposes as well. But I was targeting the Arduino Due, which has a similar CPU and no run-time to get in the way. You could even configure it to use the PPM "Extend" functionality to use a Devo Tx outputting PPM with one channel/control to test with a real Tx. The Yún would also be suitable, being a Linux system with an attached real-time CPU that PB mentioned. Of course, like the R-Pi, none of these are "fully open source", since they use proprietary CPUs .

I've not been in the GSoC before, so I'm not sure how realistic it is to expect deviationTx to get an intern. And we don't need to use any code they produce, just provide mentorship for them. I'm a lot more qualified to do that for a project like porting deviationTx to a Due than anything I've seen suggested for haskell.org.

I am an engineer, not a coder, so take my opinion like that. The weakness of Walkera and DEVO radios are the mechanics.
Well, at least compared to the top brands.
There are old MHz tx-s available for peanuts on ebay - VERY good quality pots and gimbals (Jeti, Hitec, ...) but with outdated radio with cristals, long metal antennae and stuff, which nobody uses any more.
I could imagine scrapping the interior and wiring up a multimodule + a processor board with a simple LCD.
I don't mind a low res LCD (I have a D10...), I am looking at the plane/copter not the LCD...
Maybe this is an other would be market segment. Get an upmarket radio for peanuts
cheers
bm

...and not to forget the CARS! An exploding market, even I have 2, both with old MHz Tx's.
2 ch only, BUT I'd be happy to program increasing expo on steering by speed, etc

And boats. Power boats use the standard surface Tx's, but sail boats (my Orion got here today) use an airplane-like Tx with two sticks. They even have 4 DOF, 3 of which are loaded to spring back to center, one of which (the sheet servo) doesn't.

But this is getting way off topic. The critical questions for a foundation are:

Would PhracturedBlue object to someone creating one? If so, the topic should be locked.

Anyone besides me willing to be an officer?

PhracturedBlue wrote: Pretty off-topic as far as whether we need a foundation or not though

Clearly we don't need a foundation. This is a hobby - we don't need deviationTx, or model aircraft. I think the question should be whether or not having some kind of non-profit organization would be good for the community. Enough other open source projects have decided that the answer is "yes" that there are organizations whose goal is helping non-profit projects set up such organizations.

While my original thought was dealing with the web sites when you weren't available, what such an organization would really be is a way for people who have money but otherwise feel unable to give back to the deviationtx community to do so. People here have indicated that they would be willing to donate money, and you seem to have gotten enough questions about that that you created a FAQ entry for it. A foundation (or whatever it wounds up being called) would be a strict non-profit, and the officers would probably be forbidden from accepting money from it. Whether or not you accepted anything from it would be up to you.

Even a little bit of cash would allow for a foundation to do things like a small bulk order of multimodule PCB boards and Rx modules, that they could then sell to people at cost, so they wouldn't have to wait for shipping from China or a PCB fabrication store. Someone asked about deviationTx lanyards, and it's possible to get custom lanyards done for a reasonable price - if you order enough of them. It might even be a win if all it did was organize and distribute bulk purchases of things like this.

Nuts, I'm willing to tackle the lanyards on my own. Any chance I can have permission to use the banner graphics from deviationTx.com to print on lanyards for a bulk purchase?