Cooper: our flight control system is built by us from the ground up. Part of this included getting rid of the Edison shield and incorporating it into our main board (while also getting rid of things that were unneeded and taking up excess space) We are using an Edison as our co-processor for handling all tasks that are not realtime critical. This makes it so that the user doesn't have to worry about PID tuning (unless they want to) and leaves the Edison to do all the heavy lifting of the programs running on it so that flight worthiness (multiple failsafes) is never effected. Edison has excellent performance/watt throughput, integrated BT + Wifi connectivity, and a flexible yocto recipe, which makes it very attractive for our applications.
I’m not sure what you mean here. Compilation time is first of all, very minimal, because most of the existing components are already compiled and provided as binaries by our image running on Edison. Secondly, because it is compiling on the device itself, it will not hinder your ability to develop on Forge. You’re not compiling a Linux image, or flight controller firmware, or sensor libs from scratch. You’re only compiling the code you wrote on Forge.
As for your final point: while yes, this is just another platform to learn how to use an Arduino, we feel that with drones becoming an estimated 80 billion dollar market by 2020 there is huge rewards for becoming familiar with these systems. This means users will greatly benefit from not only learning what drones can do, but what they can't do. All of this while also being the people who will be entering the workforce during this great spike.
Metatron: You're actually pretty on point and have pointed to a lot of things we did, with only minor designer differences. As far as heat concerns go, the electronics have no foreseeable reason to have any issue aside from actual shorts (which are less worrying then if we had a carbon fiber frame) We do realize that that we probably gave Eedu more power than it "needed" but when we we're doing efficiency testing we found that the drop in performance was ultimately not worth "cheeping out" for. Same with processor, we came at it with the idea that we never wanted someone to complain that they weren't able to complete a job because the processor wasn't capable. Also having friends at Intel who had not only put the Edison on a rover kit but had also shown interest in wanting to see one on a drone helped.
Yeah, tooling is what it is, and since we do have more then 2 pieces (battery pack, bottom body, top body, and legs) those prices are a little short, but also we are trying to hire more devs to focus on the other part of our product (Forge) the community driven developer platform.