"You can do both, it is possible to read the bytes you want straight from the port, but this might be a bit complicated since there is some mavlink stuff going on usually so you would need to know what kind of messages you want to pick from the…"

"If you happen to be doing some sort of inertial navigation with the APM, there seem to be some issues with the attitude information also. Namely the accuracy of the attitude estimation is not all that good. Its ok for keeping the copter with in…"

"There is some testing going on using http://www.rtklib.com/ for the positioning (requires an ground station) the accuracy seems to be around 0.5m. The problem with the traditional GPS is lots of noise and drifting, meaning that basically if you…"

"Yes this is a very good Idea :) thumps up!"

"I actually did do some testing regarding linearization of the the motors (longer explanation here: http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/linearizing-motor-thrust) but as I took some measurements of my own at a bench test, I noticed that the thrust…"

"I am seeing bit of same kind of issues with YAW. My problems were much moro pronounced when using ESC:s with different firmware. forcing the yaw with hand would basically cause the copter to flip. I think these problems might be related to the…"

"You can use mono on Linux and I would suppose that it also works with mac http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMac On linux you just run the exe file like "mono ArdupilotMega10.exe""

"I think this would be a great idea! I have had few near misses my self also with accidentaly nudging the throtle. This issue is "worse" with simonk firmware which realy kicks up the motors. I have also had some issues with bugs and wrong…"

"I made some more tests now by increasing he  stabilizeP-Imax to the max value that the planner would allow, but the behaviour did not really change at all. It seemed as if the motor commands would be saturated by the controllers. I havent yet…"

"I guess It may depend on the vendor / application, check this i2c ESC protocol spec from Overview LTD (more applicable to camera optics).   http://overview.co.uk/pdfs/Titan%20BLDC%20motor%20i2c%20Protocol.pdf I dig the "Is Motor…"

"They should, I would think. I don't know really, but I'm assuming we're talking about 2-way communication here.  The key is the 2-way."

"do i2c based ESC's make failure detection any easier? "

"Brad, excellent post, but there are a few issues: Most of us are using props which do not have RPM ratings.  They are cheap pieces of junk of unknown origin, unknown quality, and often unknown manufacturer!  Yeah, it's a bit scary.…"

"I am acutely interested in just this area of multicopter research.  While I leave the coding up to the developers, and the priorities for the APM direction up to the community, I have developed a few opinions on the subject. There has been very…"

"I had tried setting the stabilize Imax on the PID setup screen, there the mission planner seems to cap the value to 50, but there does not seem to be any cap when setting on parameter list."

"Where were you setting them? Try using the parameters tab rather than all the other setup tabs.  I think I have seen this before."