Controlling Motors with the Arduino Due

I recently decided to take on a little project, but I'm coming at it as a complete beginner to electronics and have a few question.

So, the project is fairly ambitious for a beginner (a quadcopter... :sweat_smile: ) but I figure it's really just a lot of little projects strung together - get a led blinking, get a buzzer making noise, make a motor spin, make two motors spin and so on so I don't really mind how far I get to the ultimate goal!

I've roughly been following Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting. as a guide, but there isn't a whole lot of information on it.

Anyway, I bought the Due because I thought the most recent one would be the best choice... but now I'm seeing that there might be some issues with the fact that it can't accept 5v and there isn't as much info out there about it compared to the Uno. So my questions:

  1. If I wanted to get a simple setup of the Arduino controlling a brushless motor - what exactly would I need? As far as I can see I need the motor, a Lipo battery and an ESC... am I missing anything?

  2. My next question is, could anyone point me to versions of each of these things that would work with the arduino due? Would the parts list on the owenquad site be suitable?

  3. Once all this is set up, would it be possible to control the motors by sending signals from Python? I'm ultimately hoping to have the Arduino connected

Also any tips and pointers that might be useful appreciated.

Thanks!