I am still kinda new to all of this even though I have been flying regular battery powered helis for a while.

I got a built quad copter from Jdrones. When trying to configure it I used the configurator by mistake. I was told by Jani that this quad does not support the configurator and I should use the CLI instead. When I did use the configurator, the right motor got scorching hot. It appears that I may have been lucky and did no damage. I got everything working and did some test take offs and landings to get the trims right. On one of the take offs the "left" motor stopped working all together. I did a reboot of the quad and everything seemed to be OK. The next time I took the quad out to fly as soon as I connected the battery I sensed a dead short and immediately disconnected the battery. I could feel it start to puff in my hand and the wires got really hot.

Any suggestions to trouble shoot this. Should I disconnect all the escs and try again ? I am figuring I need to eliminate sources of shorts or bad devices. Could it be the board itself?

I was also thinking of switching to the pirates version of software after I straighten this situation out.

I am trying to find a simple way of getting the software, modifying it for my copter and installing it on the quad. This sounds so simple but seems so hard. I am an electronics engineer (from the 70's) and also have programming experience but this part of it seems so intimidating. Any simple step by step procedure for this?