"I'm quite convinced that ESCs should be in the prop wash, so I don't think physically embedding them into the centre of a quad is a good idea. Primarily because it's the best way to keep them cool - no point in adding fans when there…"

"@John - there are some much smaller logic-level N-Channel MOSFETs with much higher current capacities. Look at some of the SMT packages - TO-252, D-PAK and I-PAK are just as easy to solder as TO-220.They are probably cheaper as well - similar (or…"

"Silly, it's no more spoof-proof than any other military-grade GPS device that has the encryption keys.- It might be smaller than existing encrypted units though, which would be interesting to the USA military but not for anybody else. The way…"

"@Carl - the Martian atmosphere is pretty much pure CO2, with a bit of Nitrogen and Argon. (Traces of other things) We're not going there anytime soon, need to be confident that the astronauts would (a) survive the trip there, (b) have enough…"

"The airbag decision was down to weight - Curiosity weighs a lot. They reckoned that airbags big enough to land it would be too big, too heavy and probably burst on impact anyway - drop a man on an exercise ball and it's a cushion, drop a car on…"

"Either coincidental bad luck or a wire got moved by accident during the installation and shorted out. It is practically impossible for interference on the ESC signal wire to damage any well-designed ESC, invalid input should be ignored and…"

"These brushless motors are essentially 3-phase motors, the ESC pulses the three wires in sequential order. The direction they spin is down to the order of the wires. So connect the three wires however you want, and if it spins the wrong way swap any…"

"The photo makes it looks like you've blocked all the vents on the laptop. That would be a very bad thing! Aside from that, it's looking very nice. What's that nonsense about being knocked out at the next deliverable? You can achieve…"

"You can see it trying to flip itself over... Can IC engines even respond fast enough to stabilise?"

"Did you test those settings? Rule One: Know what your aircraft does on loss-of-signal. Never guess and never assume.If you don't know, don't fly until you find out.- Take the props off, run it up and turn off the Tx. What does it do? Is…"

"Is that 24 props, or did I miss some? Are you bussing prop groups together so it 'looks' like a hexacopter to the APM, or did you do something else to get it to drive that many?"

"That variable period is what Pulse Position Modulation means. It is the way that analogue RC Txs communicated with their Rx, and thus a lot of Rxs still have this as an optional built-in output - including modern digital ones. You'll notice…"

"Apologies if I'm teaching people to suck eggs. The PPM Encoder takes up to 8 individual inputs from the Rx and re-encodes them as a single pulse train. This allows all the Rx inputs to be received by the main APM MCU (2560) on a single pin with…"

"There's no point removing the solder, any information about the failure will already have been cleaned away by the flux - that's what flux is for. I would first check all the passives on the PCB (capacitors and resistors). If any of those…"

"The magnet almost certainly is not responsible. It's a shame you didn't take a photo of the damage to the PCB before your fix. Was it bent away from the PCB substrate and discoloured? (eg Green/blue) If so, then it was a pretty big…"

"There simply isn't any code that uses the DMP. There is ArduIMU v3 software that treats the MPU6000 as a pair of dumb sensors, the same as on the ArduIMU v2. AFAIK, that works but there's little to no processing power left in the AVR to do…"