If I remember well, the 5V switching regulator was introduced in the Tiny 0.9 boards to reduce the heat of the linear BEC regulators often found in small motor controllers because servos often use more power in automatic flight flight than in manual flight.
Nowadays several good motor controllers have beter power regulators than the tiny TINY board, especially in "not so tiny" aircraft. That is why we made a tiny board with only the 3.3V regulator. Servos (and the 6V compatible decade counter) are powered by the 6V motor controller BEC (in our case a 5LiPo 120Amp brushless controller with a 8Amp switching BEC). The 3.3V regulator is changed to a low dropout lt1963 that accepts much more than 6V and still works with 3.6V (unlike the 3940 on the tiny2.11!!). The board also has a serial optocoupler port to allow the RC and ADC to be located further away in case of problems.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dewagter/3830447907/
Christophe
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: antoine drouin <address@hidden>
In a larger aircraft, servos are likely to be far apart from the
autopilot. Why don't you guys use an external servo driver located
close to clusters of servos and containing the adequate power supply.
I made such a board some time ago for a specific application
(http://poinix.org/images/csc_1_0.jpg) . It connect to the autopilot
through CAN bus wich is more robust than PPM on longer wires.
Regards
Poine
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Prof. Dr.-Ing. Heinrich Warmers" <address@hidden>
for high power system it would be nice to have no dc current ways from
the autopilot to the drive and servo system.
A good way to eliminate EMC problems will be the use of opto couplers
also for the servo counter.
One for count and one for reset.
Another free GPL autopilot project have also isolated the Servo systems
with opto couplers to.
Another good idea is to isolate the RC Receiver by a opto coupler to.
Heinirch