@all: Yes, the project is alive.
@NotGump has finally been able to pry loose enough time from building a farm to get back to work on the high-power electronics. He's working up a breadboard rig now.
I have been doing design work on the spec, writing white papers, and retiring old issues that have been resolved by more recent decisions. The most recent major one has been to identify a plug-and-play range of battery products speaking SBS that we can use for prototyping - smart-battery packs built for multirotor UAVs.
Yes, these are LiPo which is not ideal. But we can use them to build a proof of concept, debugging the power plane and control logic, then replace them with anything that speaks SBS. Down the road that probably means semi-custom LiFePO4 packs built by some outfit like CALB or BatterySpace.
They key point is that we now know exactly how to modularize out the battery-subsystem design problem, even down to the connector type. High-end drone-battery packs use a connector called an EC5; one of the things I'm hunting now is the pinout (pretty much has to be two wires SMBus, two wires VDC, and a ground but I don't know the order yet)
With that variable pinned down, we actually have something not far from a design we can make and test.
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