Here's the latest:
Denny: Yes, I used to actually warn people against messing around with APM Helis too much. We had a lot of problems. There were the general code bugs, but more importantly, it was very sensitive to high frequency vibration generated when a bearing starts to go bad. Everything could be fine, and then you could have a bearing start to go in-flight and cause a crash. But since we started using the DLPF in the MPU6000, that problem just disappeared. I have discovered some REALLY bad bearings on rebuilds that I didn't know where there, but would have made it totally unflyable in the past. And most of the code bugs have been worked out. The code is now structured much better, so we avoid making new bugs. And we have so many beta test fliers, the system is quite mature now.
I did recently crash my 450 because the APM board had a hardware failure of some sort. But it's a really freak occurrence that could happen on any system. And that board has been crashed hard many times so... Maybe not a surprise.
