Where I Am At:

Thus far I have been simply doing a lot of reading into what specs people have discovered about the ar drone and how to mod it.
From what I've read, I've learned that its very possible to add your own hardware and implement it's usage. This is a bit tricky however because Parrot does not appear to favor people tampering with their nifty little toy, and thus there aren't really any data sheets of the hardware to help us out. Nevertheless there are people who have done this, and the link that I previously had posted (yesterday morning) is actually super extra helpful. There is also a forum (on a website i also posted on this blog) that has a section dedicated to modding the drone.

It appears that to get this ball rolling we need to edit one little setting if we are to try flashing the rom via usb (which would be ideal because we can then see the progress from a pc; it should also be noted that we'll have to create our own usb wire, i wonder about a driver for it too?). The drone has a driver that is automatically set to only allow flashing rom from on the drone. After changing the setting, permission will be granted to do it from the usb connection (from a flash drive or straight from the pc are both possible). I'm not totally sure how we do this yet, i think we need to edit the .plf file. It might be possible to just change it from a pc but that doesn't really make sense since we won't have permission.
This brings us to our next step, editing and making our own version of a .plf file. From what i understand, the .plf file has something to do with installing the kernel on the drone. Firmware upgrades from Parrot are also in this file format, and the E/S and I blog talks about making your own kernel as a .plf file. This means that somewhere in the creation of our own (that sounds like way too big a task) or the editing of one of Parrot's firmware upgrade, is the spot we must edit to take advantage of any hardware we might add to the drone.

As for talking about adding hardware, i think the knowledge i have accumulated is still too vague to write about. As previously mentioned, this is a bit of a challenge without data sheets of the hardware. What i can say now is that the project i would like to work on is adding proximity sensors (at this stage i think ultrasound sensors are a good option but ill also need to look into that more, its not a definite decision) to the sides of the drone and edit the kernel so that if the drone gets too close to anything it will react one way or another (which is totally up to us) so that it evades any collisions. This is all up in the air though and we can work on any other projects, so if you guys prefer the gps or have any other ideas feel free to share

Finally...i can go eat =)
Enjoy your day people