 I just finished my new FPV drone build. I'm so excited to do this thing. Just got my props on. Let's go and fly it. Why did that happen? You're gonna learn today. Here at Rotor Riot, we sell a bunch of different drones. We sell a bunch of built and tuned drones, which means they're ready out of the box to fly. And we also sell DIY kits. And if you're a new pilot, there are still sometimes things that you can mess up and your quad won't take off and it's really frustrating. I've been there. So I talked to our customer support team and we chose the top five issues that they keep seeing reoccurring. So we wanted to make a video that's very step by step. We will get your drone flying in the intro. The quad flipped out right on arm and right when I try to take off. So the first thing we wanna check is our prop and motor direction. It's the most common error that we see when the quad flips out like that. Props are also really easy to change. So you wanna look at that first because honestly, I still have that quad flip out a lot of the times and it's usually just a prop on the wrong way. So we have a couple of different directions that we can spin our props. We can do props in or props out. Here at Rotor Riot, we typically do props out just because it's a little bit better if you're trying to fly and when you bounce off things in particular, the props are spinning outward so you won't be sucked into the object if that makes sense. So we have motor one, two, three, and four. And for props out, we want motor one to be spinning counterclockwise, motor two to be spinning clockwise, motor three to be spinning clockwise and motor four to be spinning counterclockwise. And you can tell which way the prop spins because the leading edge of the prop, it will be facing up a little bit. So you'll see how this one, it's angled up. That's gonna be spinning that way. So this is something that even I still do today by accident is put props on wrong. So we can go ahead and take a look at the drone and we can notice that motor one and two are wrong and we are able to tell that by looking at the leading edges and realize that this is actually spinning clockwise. This one should be spinning counterclockwise. We're gonna go ahead and take off the props and make sure they're spinning the right way. So it looks like motor one is wrong as well as motor two. So we're just gonna swap those props. Another tip is the props diagonal of each other should be spinning the same way. All right, so we just fixed our prop direction. Let's go ahead and see if it'll fly. All right, something's still wrong. Prop direction was wrong, but that was not the only issue we had. We're also gonna go ahead and check our motor direction right now. And one really important thing today when checking your motor direction is to take off the props. Guys, I've got my finger really bad from drone props. Please take off your props. I know it sounds cheesy. You probably hear this all the time if you've been in after a while but you really wanna save your fingers from the blood and the trip to the ER that you might get. So let's go ahead and take off the props real quickly. Make sure our radio's turned on. We're gonna go ahead and plug in our drone again. We're gonna go ahead and arm the drone. Make sure it throttles all the way down. Drone is armed. So remember how I said earlier, this is motor one, two, three and four. And I also told you guys is the way they should be spinning props out. We're gonna go ahead and actually physically feel the motor with our finger and see which way it's spinning. So this one is spinning props out. This is correct. Number two. Oh, number two is wrong. Okay, number two is spinning props in. Let's check number three. Number three is correct. Number four is correct. So just motor number two is wrong. So to fix this, we're gonna have to go ahead and go into Betaflight. So let me open up Betaflight real quick and change the motor direction in there. Make sure the cable that you're using is a data cable. Some cables are just power and they won't actually connect to Betaflight. So make sure you have a data cable. If you have a GoPro, GoPro cables work. All right, so it's plugged into the flight controller. Betaflight is open. And let's go ahead and go to our motors tab. So the firmware on this drone is Betaflight 4.3.1. I highly recommend if you are a Betaflight pilot, let you update your firmware to this. I think this is the latest at the time. This just makes changing motor direction a lot easier and also just flies better because it's the newest, latest and greatest. So let's go ahead and go to our motors tab. Go ahead and enable expert mode because we are experts. We're gonna go ahead and plug in a battery because we're going to have to spin the motor for us. And go to where it says motor direction. I understand the risk, all propellors are removed. Click that. So the wizard resets all motor spin directions that allows the user to choose which to reverse. And if you wanna do them individually, you set the motor spin direction by selecting and spinning each motor individually. We're gonna go ahead and do the wizard just because it's easier. It doesn't all at one time. Gonna go ahead and start spin motors. Feel them. And it was motor two, that was wrong. So we can just go ahead and click on the number two button right above the stop motor sign. And there we go. We got number two selected and motor two is now spinning the correct way. And there we go. So we can go ahead and go to our motor test tab. It's in the red side of the screen. And basically, so we just switched the motors. But now this is going to allow us just to test them like we did earlier when we just armed it. But instead of doing it through the software. So I understand the risks, all propellors are removed. Just gonna do the master slider up a little bit. And there we go. All of our motors are now spinning the correct way. Make sure that when you go to test slider that you have your props on the correct orientation and then you should be good to go. Number two. Another reason your quad might not be taking off is because of flight controller orientation. It basically tells the drone where the gyro is. And if it thinks your quad is upside down but your quad is actually reset up, it'll try to correct for issues that aren't there. And then as a result, your quad will do what it did earlier today. Flip out and not take off. So let's go ahead and open up beta flight because this is a problem to fix in beta flight. So first to check off if our orientation is correct, you're gonna go to the setup tab. That is the tab in the top left corner. And there's a little arrow on the drone and that shows where the front is. So let's go ahead and see. We're gonna pitch the quad forward. Oh, nope, it's pitching backwards. That automatically we know our flight controller orientation is off. So we're gonna go ahead and go to our configuration tab. And where it says board and sensor alignment, top right tab. So in our case, it was the yaw axis that was messed up but it's gonna be different for every drone. And depending on how you mount your flight controller, it might be the pitch, it might be the roll. So basically just test all of those in 180 degree segments. Keep going back to the setup tab until you get your drone moving correctly as what it shows on the screen. Yaw degrees, set that to zero. Return, save and reboot. It'll exit out and then it'll go back in. That's normal. I'm gonna go back to our setup tab and let's go ahead and see. Boom, there we go. So see our drone is now moving corresponding to what the drone on the screen is showing. And like I said, it might not be your yaw, it might be something else. So just keep trying your roll axis, your pitch axis and your yaw axis until you get it right. All right, so if you've done the first two steps and your quad still isn't taking off and it's flipping out, there's one more thing that you can try and that is to reorder your motor mapping. Basically your flight controller has four inputs for the motor to talk to. Your motor goes to your ESC and your ESC talks to your flight controller and this can be an issue because you remember earlier how we had our motors mapped one, two, three and four. Basically if motor one here is actually talking to input four on the flight controller, that can cause it to be confused. So basically we have to remap the motor so that motor one is talking to input one on the flight controller, number two to the flight controller and so on and so forth. So let's go ahead and go to the motors tab and this is actually under the mixer tab on the top left corner. Go ahead and click reorder motors. Gotta have a battery plugged in. I understand the risk, the props are removed. Yep, hit start. Okay, so to reorder your motors, you see how one of the motors is spinning right here? This is motor four, so that's the top left motor. So we're gonna go ahead and click on the top left motor. Once we click that, it's gonna go ahead and go to the next one. So motor one is spinning, but that's the back right. So we're just gonna go ahead and click the back right. Boom. All right, so now we have motor two spinning, which is our top right motor. We're gonna go ahead and click that in beta flight, click that, boom. And now we have our last one, this is motor three, it's spinning right here. So we're gonna go ahead and click the bottom left motor in beta flight. Boom. All right, so we're gonna go ahead and hit save. Bam, saved. Save and reboot. It'll restart, that's normal. And to check this back to the motor test mode, click I understand the risks. And we're going to spin up motor one. So that's this tower right here. Spin it up very slowly. Don't put it up too high, or else it'll kind of freak out. So motor one's spinning right there. We're gonna go ahead and check. Motor one is spinning. There we go. That's good, motor one. Put motor one down. We're gonna go ahead and slide up motor two tab a little bit. Motor two is good. Go ahead and flip up motor three. Boom, motor three is spinning. And motor four. Awesome. All right, so we just got our motor three mapped. Make sure to put your props on the right way and then you should be good to go. All right, so just a little disclaimer. The method that we use to reorder on motor mapping and to change our motor direction. This is a feature of beta flight and you have to be on beta flight 4.3 on the drone in order to use this. I highly recommend you update to 4.31. It first off flies a lot better and makes this whole process of motor direction and motor room mapping so much easier. Number four is channel mapping. All right, so here we have a quad we just built, flipping our arm switch. It's not arming so let's go ahead and open up beta flight on plugged quad. And the biggest issue that can cause this is your channel mapping. So channel mapping is you have four accesses on your controls. You have roll, pitch, yaw, and throttle. Your flight controller has four inputs that each channel is given to you. So channel one is throttle, channel two is yaw, three is pitch, four is roll, et cetera. It could be in different orders depending on what radio link you're using but we're using crossfire right now. And if you look on the screen in beta flight the quad is just flipping out. We're basically gonna remap it so that throttle is the throttle, roll is the roll and so on. So it's actually very simple. There's a little channel map tab on the right side. You'll see AETR1234. So we're gonna go ahead and click that down and right now it's on default so we're gonna go ahead and try Spectrum Grapner JR. That says T-A-E-R1234. Go ahead and hit save. Boom. Now we can move our throttle stick, roll stick, pitch stick, yaw stick, and those all align properly. So there's two drop downs in the menu. There's the Free Threat Futaba High-Tech one and the Spectrum Grapner and JR one. And if both of those don't work you can actually go in and manually change the number. So you see here we have T-A-E-R-E1234. So let's just imagine that it was T-A-R-E. So basically it gives you some set presets that are the most common ones that you have but if that doesn't work then you can do that manually just like I did right there. So another part of channel mapping is your switch assignments. Obviously we have the controls that we talked about earlier but our switches are also talking to the drone so the drone also has channels for each switch that we assign to it. So if your quad is not arming one of those switches could be set up wrong. So we're gonna go ahead and go into our modes tab. We have no modes assigned so that's an issue. So we're gonna go ahead and assign those right now. All right, so it's different for every radio but this is the Rotari TX16S Radio Master and it is running Edge TX. So in this case we're gonna go ahead and press the model. We're gonna go ahead and go to our mixes tab and you see how it says channel 1234 and they all have different inputs. So to set this up you're gonna go ahead and click on the channel that you want. So we're gonna go ahead and click channel five and we hit edit and see where it says source. We're gonna go down to, we're gonna go down here and so the switch right now we have set up is SG and to select a switch that you want, just flick the switch and it'll automatically do it. So right now it's on SG. If I want it to be SC, I flick SC but I want it to be on the switch right here and these switches are labeled all around the radio so you can know which one you wanna assign. I'm gonna go ahead and flip switch G, go ahead and click enter and then once you have that set up, hit return and we're gonna go ahead and do that for as many channels as you need. So personally I only use ARM in turtle mode so we're gonna go ahead and set up that. So we have SG set up to channel five and go ahead and click on channel six, edit, scroll down and I want SA to be my turtle mode. So boom, just like that. Selected, SA, return, return, return and boom. So now we can go ahead and go to beta flight. But also if in the receivers tab you don't see any stick assignments, you don't see your sticks moving, it's probably because you might need a battery plugged in. It's different for every flight controller that you have because some flight controllers, the five volt pad can also be powered off of the USB-C plug or sometimes it needs to be powered off of your XC60. So here we have our mode tab. We're gonna go ahead and go to our ARM that's where we're gonna set up first. We're gonna hit add a range and you see where it says right next to the great little square it says auto. It's gonna auto detect which switch you want or which channel you want. So we set up SG to be our ARM just go ahead and flick that and you see now it should switch to Oxone and we can see little yellow dot moving on the screen. Basically you're gonna put the switch in the position that you want it to be when the quad is going to be armed. So I want it to be away from you when I arm so I have it right there. And you see there's a little yellow tab right there. We're gonna go ahead and slide the yellow bar over on top of that yellow tab. This means that when the little yellow dot is within that tab or within that area it is going to be armed. So ARM is set up we're gonna hit save and then go ahead and scroll down to flip over after crash there we go add a range do the same process on auto flip that switch and I want and I want flip over after crash to be enabled when it's away from me. So do that drive the yellow bar over it, boom, hit save. So your radio has a set amount of channels I think the radio master has like 18 channels and you have to assign your switches to each channel. It's kind of nice if they do this because you can put whatever switch you want on any channel but at the same time it's also like you have to do it. So make sure you don't forget to do that. And otherwise you'll just be flipping a bunch of switches and nothing will be happening in Betaflight because the switch is not assigned to a channel. If when you flip the ARM switch while it's connected to Betaflight it's not arming. That is a safety feature of Betaflight because it doesn't want people to accidentally arm the quad while props are on inside. Number five is bad motor or bad ESEE and this can be seen by a stuttering motor or a motor that just won't spin at all. So if you see here, we have our quad, it's taped down for safety. Go and arm it and you see how this one is stuttering but this one is smooth. There's something wrong with this motor or this ESEE. So let's go ahead and see what it is. Just arm unplugged battery because I kind of like my fingers right now. So the first thing we're gonna check is our motors and so there's a couple of different things that can be wrong with the motors. The first one will be obvious like in big indentations in the bell or if you physically can't spin it with your hand that is a sign that the bell is dented and it's not going to spin. But in this case, it looks like we have some broken windings. This is one of those issues that some people overlook because the bell may look perfectly fine but some of the windings are ripped and the windings are the little coiled pieces of metal inside the motor on the stator. So see that little winding right there? That's broken. So basically that means that the ESEE current is not fully flowing all the way through the motor. And if you look at a good motor, you see all the perfect coils, nothing's broken, it looks nice and tight. Another thing is to check if it's a broken winding, you can spin the motor when there's no battery plugged in. Hear that little clicking? That's the top of the bell actually hitting that broken winding. This is what a good motor should sound like. Good motor, bad motor. So if you see any windings broken or a really dented bell, unfortunately you killed that motor because you were full sending, you were crashing, you were getting better. But unfortunately you did break a motor so go pick up another one at Rotoride.com. And if after that it doesn't work, that's an ESEE issue. ESEE issues kind of suck because if you're using a 4-in-1 ESEE like we are in this build, you're gonna have to replace the whole 4-in-1 ESEE. And that's one of those things where it might take you like an hour to put in a new ESEE just because it's really a main part. You have so much stuff connected to it. You have your flat controller, all of your motors and your XC60 lead. So in this build we have a 4-in-1 ESEE but there are also individual ESEEs which basically means so with the 4-in-1 ESEE you have four ESEEs put onto one board. Individual ESEEs, they're not in one board. And so there's a couple benefits of using individual ESEEs. The benefit being that if you do break one you can just easily replace that one. It'll be a lot cheaper. But the downside is it is a little bit heavier and a little bit more tedious to build because you have to start on more wires. Some things that can cause an ESEE to die are if you're trying to turtle mode. So turtle mode is basically when your quad is upside down. Turtle mode is a feature that lets two props change direction and you can flip the quad over. But if you're stuck in grass and your motors are physically being blocked from spinning that can cause an ESEE to burn. So to prevent ESEEs from burning just go walk and pick up your quad. That's the biggest thing that I typically see I'm in burning ESEEs and motors. So don't be lazy. Go for a little walk, touch grass while you pick up your quad and you're good to go. All right, so that was the top five reasons your drone won't fly. If you guys have any other issues with your drones that we did not cover in this video just email support at RotoRite.com and we have an awesome customer support team and they even helped me today when I don't know how to fix stuff. So send them your problem and maybe a video of what's happening so you can get your drone flying faster. Hope this video helped you guys out so you guys can keep ripping if it did please let me know in the comments down below. We always appreciate the subscribe and the like. I'm Bubby a Phoebe, this is RotoRite. I'll see you guys next time.