[falcolas]

Now that you've picked a microcontroller, here's some tips on the next steps: "How to be: A smart hardware programmer"

https://youtu.be/g8QDCMuy6oM

I link to this only partially in jest - you really will need way more components than the plan says you'll need. Even microcontrollers; misaligning a header by one pin can result in things like putting the output of a 3C Li-Poly over a signal header...

[bigiain]

This is why I like prototyping with Arduinos - you'll 99% likeley get away with plugging an 11.1V (or 12-13V fresh off the charge) battery into any of the pins on an Arduino. You'll be looking for another RasPi if you made _that_ mistake...

[falcolas]

In this case, it wasn't the voltage, which had been brought down to 5v by the motor controller, it was the 160+amps. Not milliamps, amps (3300 mah, 50c battery).

Drone batteries are nasty pieces of work...

[bigiain]

Indeed.

I wasn't paying enough attention when soldering a plug onto a 7 cell 5800mAhr 40c battery once. I melted the tip of my iron, and pretty much vapourised the plug's contacts... (The battery seemed fine about it - I got 6 or 8 months out of it powering a bicycle before it started to show signs of imminently-firey puffiness...)

[taneq]

Yeah, one of the biggest shocks to the system when going from desktop software development to embedded development is how easy it is to fry your hardware (and since this is pre-alpha grade hardware, often even with a software mistake). Never buy just one of anything because you'll let the magic smoke out, a /lot/. And that goes double if you're doing anything higher voltage than CPU supply voltage, or higher current than a few hundred milliamps.