Today I ordered all the components and started to plan how everything will fit together. All the HobbyKing parts are coming from China so I expect they will take a couple of weeks to arrive. In the mean time I plan to compile and get running the Ardupilot code on a Raspberry Pi 3 running on resin.io.

I think it may be best to use the

resin/raspberrypi3-buildpack-deps

base image as this is based on Debian with lots of of other goodness already installed. One of the reasons for this is that the pre-made OS images for the PXFmini use Debian. Having said that, I have been looking for an excuse to try an Alpine image - perhaps this is my opportunity :)

I may also need to patch the kernel with the RT patch (to enable PREEMPT), I have no idea how to do this so it should be fun to dig in and learn something new! I have access to the resin.io team so I am sure they can give me some pointers here.