 Hey guys, welcome to Rotorite. I'm Ledrib, and this is Tyler, aka Gruz FPV, aka the general manager of our retail operations here at Rotorite. What's up guys? And as Tyler to be here today, because in addition to being a badass pilot and keeping a lot of things here running, he's also responsible for making the configurations and the tunes for all of the drones that we build here. Yeah, no, I go through all of our builds and each one of them, I build up a tune from the ground up starting from scratch. There's a lot to do on a flight controller in Betaflight. A flight controller is the brain of the operations. Everything on your drone goes through the flight controller. It has to talk to different accessories you've put. It has to talk to the other components that you've put on your drone, like your air unit, your receiver, maybe your GPS. It has to send the signal to the ESCs to power the motor. It has the gyro that's responsible for measuring the position of the drone relative to the position it's supposed to be at and calculating that correction and doing everything that makes a drone actually fly. So today we're going to walk you through a setup from scratch because a new version of Betaflight just came out. Correct. Betaflight 4.3 is officially released. We actually featured a release candidate of 4.3 in an earlier build video. So we've covered a little bit of this before and we've done videos like this before doing Betaflight setup. But with every version, a little bit changes. And if you've never done it before, we just wanted to make this to completely walk you through what all the different settings in Betaflight do, what you need to know to set up a flight controller from scratch. That being said, you don't need to do this. If you've bought a drone from us that flies, you don't need to go in there. I would say 80% of the issues anyone has with one of our drones is because they've plugged it in and flashed it or changed the setting or something. It's like, you don't need to do that. Just fly it. But if you're trying to enjoy the aspect of the hobby, which is building your own drones or if you're doing a repair or if you want to put on a new flight controller or if you really do just want to learn what's entailed with this, come along because we're going to break it all down for you. First thing you're going to need is the Betaflight configurator. So we'll leave a link in the description to download the latest Betaflight configurator. As of recording this video, we are on version 10.8.0. Correct. And that number is going to be different from the firmware that goes on the flight controller. So today we're going to be using Betaflight 4.3 on the flight controller, configuring using configurator 10.8.0. And we're just going to go ahead and plug it in. We've got the top plate taken off from the drone here, so we'll be pointing out how some things are hooked up when we get into it. And also note that we've got the props off. Off. Because you don't want to get chapped up. There's a two-plug rule. Two-plug rule is if you have two plugs plugged into the flight controller and the power, which we don't have the moment, but if you have that going, you definitely don't want the props on. You should never have props on your drone if you're going to have two things plugged into your flight controller, the USB and the power, right? So if you're just doing a quick change and you're not going to actually apply lipo power, you could leave the props on. But some of the configurations that we're going to do are going to require to have the ESCs powered up. And in which case it could be very dangerous if you're making a change and something goes wrong, an incorrect signal could be sent causing the motors to spin up. And if that happens on your bench, you could damage your computer. Or worse, your beautiful face. We don't want to see your beautiful faces get torn up. So please take the props off anytime you're doing anything in Betaflight that requires you to have your battery plugged in. So we got our props off. We're being safety. Let's get right into it. So when you plug it in, it'll immediately connect. But let's say you have an older flight controller that's got an earlier version of Betaflight. You're going to need to flash it to the latest version. So where do you go? First place you're going to go is to the top up here where it says update firmware. And I really like on this newer version of the configurator, they added an auto detect feature. Exactly. So previously you had to know what target you needed to put on your board. And it didn't always line up with what the board says on the packaging all this stuff. But now you don't need to think about it. As long as the correct target is on there and it should be from the factory, just hit auto detect. Exactly. And boom, T-Motor F7. That is correct. And then you can pick your version. So we're just going to pick the latest version, 4.3.0. Show unstable releases. That is if you're going to get into some of the release candidates, some of the pre-release stuff. We usually don't recommend that. So you don't need to worry about that. The next option is for no reboot sequence. The no reboot sequence means you're telling Betaflight not to try to put the board in DFU mode, which is bootloader mode. So if you do that yourself either by hitting the button on the flight controller or using a CLI command, you need to check that. But we're going to go ahead and let Betaflight handle bootloader mode for us. So we're going to leave it unchecked. What about full chip erase? Full chip erase is very important, especially moving to a brand new version of Betaflight. If you've got an older version on there, you just want to guarantee that everything's getting erased. Right. So this is going to remove all pre-existing settings and make sure that you are starting from completely fresh canvas down. And what about that manual bot rate thing? Should they even touch that? No. Yeah. So whatever it's got there, unless you're using some sort of Bluetooth configurator or something, and the device gives you instructions on changing that setting, just leave it at whatever it is at by default is going to work. So we've got all our flashing settings taken care of. We've got our target selected. We've got our firmware version selected. What's next? Load firmware online. Right. So it's going to pull the correct firmware for the correct target from the Betaflight database in the cloud. So that does mean you need to be connected to the internet for this part. So as long as you're on the internet, you click that and boom, everything's loaded up. You've got your change log. Everything's good to go. And then you just flash the firmware. Now we wait. Yep. It's going to first erase everything. Oh, no. Wait, I need it. It's gone. It's too late. It's too late. Should I unplug it? No, don't unplug it. Once you've started it, do not unplug it. That's how you could potentially break your flight controller. It's pretty hard to do. And even if you do, you should be able to save it with a bootloader sequence, like I mentioned. But best practices, when you're erasing or flashing, don't touch it. And we've successfully flashed. We got green. Green is good. Yes. All right. So now we'll go back up into Connect and we'll go back into the configurator. First thing that's going to pop up is it's going to ask you if you want to apply the custom defaults. I always apply the custom defaults. If you hit cancel, there's a chance you can run into some issues where things are connecting correctly, motor mappings off, things like that. So always select. Yeah. So those are just settings that they know are going to be correct as a baseline for that particular target that you selected. It's going to reboot everything and it should automatically reconnect. We still got warnings. Yes. So the warnings here, it's just letting you know that, hey, you've got no motor protocol selected. It's also saying you have the accelerometer enabled, but it's not calibrated. So for self-level mode, angle mode, things like that. So these are just parts of the configuration that are critical to the operation of the drone and it's noticing that we haven't selected anything. That's totally fine because again, we're starting from scratch. We're going to take care of all these things. So just hit close, leave me alone. I know what I'm doing. So the first thing that I like to do is check the board orientation. So on this setup page, you've got a model of the drone represented on screen and what's great is as you tilt the actual drone, the model should move. Basically, if you grab the back of the drone and tilt it forward, you should see the back two motors go up you should see correct sides go up and you should also see the rotation of the drone on the screen match the physical drone. If it doesn't match, that's okay. You can fix that in the configuration tab just to jump ahead here. In these settings over here for board and sensor alignment, you can put in different values to offset the board, right? So if say you lifted the side of the drone and the model tipped forward, you would need to probably do like a 90 degree adjustment on the yaw. You'll have to play with it to get it right. You can make the change, save it and go back to setup and just play with it till you get it right. But you shouldn't have to do that if you've aligned your board, right? So on this one, we've actually got it aligned correctly where the arrow printed on the flight controller is facing towards the nose of the drone. So if you've done that, you won't have this issue but there are sometimes where you need to have the board misaligned depending on your build where you want certain ports to be and it's totally okay. It's totally okay to have your board not aligned correctly. You just need to make sure that you compensate for it in the configuration. That's the first thing you want to do. And once you've done that, smash that calibrate accelerometer button, right? Exactly. Exactly. So hit that. Don't touch the table and it's just going to calibrate your accelerometer which is only going to be used if you use any auto level modes. If you fly only in rate modes, it doesn't matter. But I personally like to have an auto level mode available on the switch, right? And that's really all you're going to do on the tab that they call setup. You're not actually going to set up anything. No. Yeah. From here, then I usually go to the ports tab and this tab is where you're going to set up all of the things that you have connected to the flight controller. So these are the UART settings. So UART stands for universal asynchronous receiver transmitter. Yes. Nailed it. And you think of the UART as like USB ports on your computer where you can connect different accessories to your flight controller. So like I mentioned before, that could be a receiver, that could be a GPS, that could be your air unit. You need to tell the flight controller what you've connected to it and what language, what protocol it needs to use to communicate with those different items. So if you've done the build yourself, you should know what you connected to what. But if you don't, you could either look at what's printed on the board itself or look at a wiring diagram. Thankfully on this T-motor board, they actually have very clear labels. And we can see that the air unit cable is plugged into this rear port here that supplies 10 volt power, ground and has TX2, RX2, ground and SBUS. So if you look here, that's where you're going to activate the MSP configuration here on UART too. Okay, so the MSP connection is essentially a connection like a USB. It gives you full access to the flight controller. You can actually see that for the USB UART, they've got MSP checked and don't ever uncheck that because then you won't be able to access your board through the USB port. But that MSP connection is going to allow the air unit to talk to the flight controller and actually change settings because with the DJI system, you can change your PIDs right in the toggle menu. And it's also going to be responsible for taking the information and generating the DJI driven on-screen display. And if you happen to be using the avatar system, which is upcoming, you would also have it connected to MSP even though you'd have to do some additional things to make the Canvas mode on-screen display work. Other times you might encounter an MSP connection would be like if you're soldering on a Bluetooth adapter to allow you to make changes through your phone that uses MSP. And there could be some other things, but most of you guys are probably using an air unit or an avatar and you need to make sure that you get that MSP connected correctly. On that same port for the air unit, I mentioned there was something labeled S-Bus and that would be another UART. I think it's UART 1. UART 5. It's UART 5, so that's good to know. So you'd have to check the wiring diagram for that. So if we were going to use the air unit for control using the DJI radio, you would also need to turn on the receiver function for UART 5. But we're not doing that, right? Because we've got this crossfire receiver. What's that hooked up to? Also UART 5. Okay, so there's two places where you can access UART 5 on this board, either through that plug for the DJI system or through this crossfire one. It's okay that they're soldered to the same one. Okay, that's cool. I didn't know that, so it'll just listen to whatever language we tell it to listen to. Okay, so we've got the crossfire receiver hooked up to R5 and T5, so I guess we're still going to just click serial RX. It's very important to get the right function clicked for the right UART. So if we had this crossfire receiver over here on UART 4, you would click 4 instead. What you need to know is that every horizontal line represents that UART and you can only assign one function. You couldn't just also solder up a GPS to UART 5 and tell it to do that. You'd need to do a separate one, but if we did hook up a GPS to UART 3, that would be over there and like peripherals, right? Yes, I believe that would be in sensors. In sensors, yeah. But we didn't do that. We're not messing with GPS today. All we're doing is the UART. All we're doing is the MSP connection on UART 2 and the receiver connection on UART 5. Yep. And then from there, you just save and reboot. We still got warnings. It's still not happy with us. Yes. Okay, we're going to get to the motor stuff, Betaflight. Calm down. And verified. For some reason, it likes to default back to the ports tab. Even though it says set up up here, but yeah, I just verify that the ports are correct and then we can move on to the configuration tab. So this is where we change the settings that you may have heard of, where it's 8K, 4K, 8K, 8K and all that stuff. What all that means is you're setting the speed of the processor and the speed of the communication to the ESCs, right? It says gyro update frequency and the PID loop frequency. We're just going to leave those alone. This is using the Bosch gyro. So in past flight controllers, you usually see 8K up here, 8K, 8K or 8K, 4K. Right. This newer Bosch gyro is 3.2K. So there are different gyros that could be put on the flight controller from the manufacturer, especially today with the chip shortage that we're facing, manufacturers are having to start using different gyros. It seems that the most common one right now is a Bosch style gyro that actually runs on like a base 3.2. So if you were using an MPU6000 or an ICM2060, whatever it is, those would run on like a 4K or an 8K update frequency and you could have some room to play with that whether you want to use 4 or 8. But if you see that it's set to 3.2, that means you're probably running the Bosch gyro and you just shouldn't touch it, right? Yes, just leave it alone. So right here, we have the different sensors on the flight controller. We have the accelerometer, which is the piece that we calibrated on the setup page. We will be using that for auto-level mode, so I'm going to leave that on. But the barometer and magnetometer, we don't even have on this flight controller, so we could save some resources by turning those off. Moving down on the left side here, you have the craft name. So if you have a certain name you want for your build, you can just slap that right in here. This is a beautiful skyliner. So yes, and a cool thing that Betaflight does for you is as you name your crafts, it kind of saves them. Oh, cool. So this is a skyliner. Below that, there's a setting for your camera angle. What that does is, there are flight modes where the flight controller could compensate for the angle of your camera and do some of the yaw and roll mixing for you. It's cute, but I don't recommend using it, so I would just leave it at zero, even though you will be angling your camera. If that's something you want to play with, you can check out some other videos on that. But our personal recommendation is, do the mixing of roll and yaw yourself with your thumbs and just leave that set to zero. Yes. What about the arming angle? What's that? That is very important. So by default, it's set so that the quad pretty much has to be basically flat on the ground like this to arm. Right, at 25 degrees, if the quad is tilted more than that, it won't let you spin up the props. Right. So that could be a problem. Yes, so what we like to do is set it at 180 degrees. So pretty much any angle, like upside down even, you can arm the motors. Yeah, so if you're ever going to take off from a hill or from a launch gate, or if you're crashed upside down or in a tree and you're trying to arm it to hear it or to shake it loose, you need to have that set. It is technically like a safety feature, right? If you leave it set to 25, it could be thought of as being more safe, but it would require that you're always taking off from a flat surface, which isn't the case. So go ahead and set it to 180, but just be careful when you're arming your drum, which you should do always anyways. Moving down, we have other features here. The only two that are set by default that I even mess with are air mode and OSD. Something I like to do that, not too many other people do, is I turn off air mode in other features. Having it checked by default means that air mode is permanently enabled on the fly controller and what air mode is in Betaflight. It's a different term. It's a, air mode is a term that's used in different firmwares like KISS and all that stuff differently, but in Betaflight, what it means is that it boosts the effect of the PID controller at low throttle. So it gives you more stability when you're doing low throttle maneuvers. That's what air mode is in Betaflight. I like to not have it turned on full time. If you uncheck it in the configuration tab, it will show up later in the modes tab and it will be something that you can turn on and off with a switch on your radio. I like to do that so I can turn off air mode if I'm doing like grinds or slides or other contact tricks with my drone, but most people just leave it checked. So we'll just go ahead and leave it checked today. Down below that, you also have GPS. We're not using a GPS. So we're going to leave that disabled. The only other thing that I set up is going to be the D-Shot Beacon configuration and that's the beeping sound that the motors make. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So we used to always have to solder a separate buzzer to the flight controller if we wanted the drone to be able to beep to help us find it if we crash something like that. But now they can actually use the motors as a beeper which is great. So we can turn that on. So there's two options here. There's RX set which is set up so that you can have a switch set up to activate the motors as a buzzer and then there's RX loss which means if the transmitter that you're using is not connected to the receiver Right, so if you failsafe or you turn off your radio it'll just beep automatically. I hate leaving this on because if you plug in the drone and your radio is not connected you just have to listen to the beeping like crazy. It's a good idea to have it turned on because if you failsafe which means you've lost connection to your drone when you shouldn't the beeper will turn on by default but I agree 99% of the time is just annoying. Yes, and I have I do have to plug in drones all day every day so hearing this out Yeah, it's pretty annoying. Once you've done that though you're just going to come down here hit save and reboot it's going to exit out and it should automatically connect Still upset with that I still got a few warnings We're going to get to the motor stuff We're going to get to the motor stuff We're going to get there So next up do we need to do anything in that power and battery tab? You should not need to do anything in this tab The defaults are fine What that tab is for is to calibrate the detected battery voltage so if you find that you're plugging in a battery that's charged to 16.8 volts and your on-screen display is only showing you 14 volts or something you can compensate for that there but you shouldn't have that problem If you flash the correct target and apply the custom defaults and all that stuff it should be good to go If you are having that problem it most likely indicates you've got a different issue so you shouldn't have to touch this stuff Moving forward there's the presets tab and this has made things very easy on the setup and head tuning side of beta flight It lets you use PIDs and filters that other people have already figured out for the same build or similar builds You can just click on that and set it up Eventually we'll put all the presets for our different drones in there so you'll be able to pre-select it but for now we'll set it all up manually So you'll see that the next tab down is the PID tuning tab where you can set all the PIDs and filters yourself but we're going to skip over that for now because there are some settings that we need to turn on to activate other features in the PID tuning tab so we're just going to jump straight down to receiver receiver tab This is where you're going to set up everything for the crossfire receiver that we have on this build You're going to tell the flight controller how to talk to the receiver and all that depends on which receiver you're using right? You could be using the air units built in receiver You could be using a free sky receiver ghost whatever In this case we've got a crossfire receiver For these settings to work you need to make sure the UART setting is correct for the receiver We already did that so the flight controller knows to talk to a receiver using UART 5 but now we need to tell it what language to use right? Yes, and to do that you're going to go to this receiver tab right here and you're going to select serial via UART and for the receiver type we're going to select crossfire CRSF So now the flight controller is going to know to talk to the receiver over a UART and know to use crossfire protocol to talk to that receiver So now's a good time to hit save and reboot All right, we still don't have the motor setup we know So now we've done that the screen has changed a little bit we've got access to more channels we can change the channel map things like that and really now we're at the point where we got to plug in the battery for the first time so that we can actually power up the receiver Some flight controllers will actually power the receiver through the USB but more common than not you'll need to plug in the actual battery So you can see we got a flashing green light on the crossfire We got to bind it to this transmitter Binding is getting the receiver and the transmitter linked up and the binding process is going to vary a little bit depending on what receiver you're using but for the most part it's pretty similar You activate binding in the radio You hit a button on the receiver On some receivers actually it's nice about this crossfire since it's never been bound anything before it went straight in a binding mode so we don't even have to hit the button So blinking green light means it's trying to bind Green light on the receiver means we are bound and if we look on the screen we can see the drone is freaking out because the channel mapping is incorrect So even though we aren't inputting the sticks it sees an input on the roll axis If you move the throttle it's affecting the roll So we need to find a different order of the channel So by default it's on AETR which puts the order of channels aileron elevator throttle roll but that's not what we've got on this setup We gotta find the correct channel map Yes, it's going to be the spectrum one here which is T-A-E-R Hit save And now it stopped moving and you can verify that everything is correct what you should do what you want to see is when you move the throttle up the throttle bar goes up down goes down With the roll stick move that to the left you should see the bar go to the left Same with the yaw move the yaw to the left see the bar go left and right and with pitch when you move the pitch stick down it should go to the left and up should be to the right So all of that looks correct One thing I think is worth mentioning is just back on the channel map If for whatever reason these three presets that they have here don't work for you you can still manually go in and actually type in in any order R-E-A-T or you know however you'd want for your mapping to be Good to do it and just hit save So yeah one two three four And yeah completely change it up to however you want if your radio or setup is just odd That's really nice to know that if you have some weird settings in the radio that instead of having to navigate the nightmare of OpenTX on a roller you can just do it in Betaflight Thankfully there aren't any weird settings going on here so we can just click that preset Another thing to look out for is do you have any jitter so when you're not touching the sticks how much are those numbers moving Looks like just one here for this radio Yeah So if you have a little bit of jitter you can calibrate your radio to get rid of that but it may never go away depending on what radio you're using there may always be that little bit of of jitter it's really not too bad on this it's just like going between like zero and one So if you do have that something you can do to compensate for it is RC Deadband right and just add that in for the value that it's changing Yeah I think in general putting in so you've put in one which would compensate for what we're seeing in general I think putting like three or even five is a good catch-all You know you could be out there flying and like the temperature of the air could kind of affect the sensitivity of the gimbals maybe get like a little grit in there or something so three or five is fine Another thing I like to do is the stick low threshold so what that does is it won't let you arm the drone unless your throttle stick is below a certain point what that does is tells the flight controller how low would you ever expect the throttle to be and below what point does the throttle need to be to arm it So by default unless your throttle input is below a value of 1050 the drone won't arm The problem is this has a side effect of creating a throttle deadband so everything below 1050 the drone doesn't actually respond to you get a little bit of deadband at the bottom you may not even notice it but if you're doing a lot of low throttle maneuvers I think it's pretty annoying so I can feel it I think it's pretty annoying so I like to drop this all the way down to just 1005 The only thing to keep in mind is your drone will not arm unless the throttle is actually that low so make sure that when you move the throttle stick to the bottom it's actually below 1005 and when I arm my drone sometimes I need to like actively hold the throttle down to be able to arm it but just makes throttle a lot smoother with low throttle maneuvers RC smoothing do you mess with that at all? I leave it on defaults so that's a function where the fly controller actually smooths your inputs a little bit it's not going to compensate for everything you still have to be smooth on the sticks but it does help just you know keep the quad from overreacting the default settings are fine and typically if not the defaults I'm going to be using a preset based on the receiver that I'm using that will change these for you that's going to do is just hit save so now that we've got everything set up in the receiver tab the fly controller knows how to respond to our stick inputs but it doesn't know how to respond to our switch inputs we would set that up in the following tab which is modes but we're going to skip over that again because we still got to get that motor protocol set up to enable one of the modes we're going to use so we're going to skip right over and finally we're going to get to the motors tab yes the motors tab so this is where we're going to configure the the order of our motors and the direction of the motors and also what protocol we're going to be using right so even up top quad x most every like every drone we sell is a x quad but you'll see like there are some other options like if you were doing like like a like a tricopter or something like that or a bi copter that's all in there but more than likely you're going to be using a x quad so first thing we're going to need to do is since our motor protocol is disabled is we need to enable that so this is essentially defining the language with which the fly controller talks to the ESCs so there's different options here there's like pulse width modulation which is a slow outdated a language that's brushed if you're actually hooking up brush motors where the where the fly controller would be set up with with the FETs to actually drive a brush motor but we've got BLHeli32 brushless motors the latest the greatest so we're going to pick a d-shot protocol right yes and I'm choosing d-shot 300 but why not go fast why not go 600 with this newer Bosch gyro there's some weird stuff can't really explain it but I found that using d-shot 300 the 3.2k gyro and PID loop frequency that d-shot 300 just seems to work the best gives you the most reliable performance personally I always use d-shot 300 even when I was using some of the other gyros that let me crank up the processing speed to like 8k I just always thought d-shot 300 was a little bit more reliable you may see some other people that are trying to squeeze every last bit of performance set their drone to run on 8k 8k use d-shot 600 we've even seen other versions of the firmware that let you go up to d-shot 1200 but 300 is going to be fine it's going to be reliable that's what we're using here yes moving down you have motor stop which is don't spin the motors when armed I never have used this before I believe when you arm it doesn't do anything until you actually add throttle yeah that's right so with motor stop enabled even when you arm the quad the props won't start spinning until you give it throttle this is a really bad idea because if you were trying to do a split s and get some like inverted hang time you lower the throttle all the way down the motors will stop and you will lose control of your drone so don't don't turn motor stop on yes and also ESC sensor is another one that I've never used before yeah so ESC sensor is if you're going to use ESC telemetry that just enables an additional communication between the ESC and the flight controllers but really you don't need to use that because d-shot can handle two-way communication and is going to be able to get all the information back and forth that you need for the features that we're going to use so you don't need to use ESC sensor but you do need to use the next one which is the bi-directional d-shot and when you enable that you actually see here that hey you're going to have some filter changes happening that your dynamic notch values are about to change right so that's going to enable some of those things that we were mentioning in the the PIDS tab and the modes tab because we've now given the flight controller the ability to not just talk to the ESC but also listen to the ESC so it's going to do things like let us use the motor beeper that we mentioned it's going to let the flight controller reverse the direction of the motor for like turtle mode and it's also going to enable a RPM based notch filter so we'll get to that in a little bit right so you're just going to hit agree when you enable the bi-directional d-shot it's going to ask you how many motor poles do your motors have and to find that out you're going to count the magnets that are on the inside of the bell here and on almost all of our motors the default value is correct there you're going to find that there are 14 magnets if you're flying on a hype train freestyle Acro, Drib, Vortex, Vanover, Let's Fly even some of the smaller tiny whoop motors even some of the smaller Cine whoop motors they're all 14 pole motors but it never hurts to double check just flip the motor over count the magnets and put the number of magnets there for number of poles and then below that you've got your motor idle and that's the static percent so 5.5 is the default and yeah that's the percentage of which your motor is idle right so again if you're trying to do like really long hang times you could play with that try lowering your idle so that you have kind of less thrust when your motors are spinning at their minimum speed however the lower you go the harder it is for the drone to stay stable and you could also end up with one of the motors stalling and spinning out so 5.5 is a safe value so now that we've done all of that we're going to want to go and hit save and reboot or so plugged in yeah so we've still got the drone plugged in and that's because now that we've got the flight controller talking to the ESC which you can tell because we finally are hearing some beeps go down there's some more settings we can do where we can set up the order of the motors and the direction of the motors this is the absolute greatest thing about this newest version of Betaflight so before if you found that when you try to spin up motor one another motor spun up and you know all the motors basically out of order the drone would absolutely not be able to fly you need to either reorder the motors by reorienting the ESC or by going into the CLI command and doing a bunch of complicated stuff but it's so great in this newest version that you can reorder the motors with a wizard and same thing with motor direction you need the props to be spinning the right direction as indicated by the diagram and you can do that all right here it's super easy I love it it's great so yeah first thing I do is start off with reordering the motors you're gonna click here and so you get this warning telling you to have your props off we talked about this your props better be off this is like absolutely when you better have your props off because we are about to intentionally spin up the motors while it's sitting right here in front of us yes so we understand the risk and the propellers are removed I'm gonna check that box and we're gonna hit start so now it started spinning one of the motors and it's got a diagram where it asked me which motor is spinning so I've got the drone sitting here in front of me with the tail facing me so it matches up with the diagram and the motor that's spinning is the front right so you just click on that now another motor starts spinning that's the front left move around now we've got the back right yep and the back left motor okay all right and once you've clicked all four motors you can hit save just like that your motors are reordered never been easier you people just getting into this you don't know how good that is you don't know what we used to have to do oh same thing with motor direction right so to change motor direction before you used to have a whole separate program to go into the BL heli settings which by the way isn't necessarily a bad idea if you want to get more advanced there are some other settings in the ESCs that you can change to squeeze out a little bit more performance but it's not necessary and now that you can just do motor directions right here in beta flight we're not going to bother with that today so let's go again start the other wizard motor direction again better have them props off can't say it enough all right we understand the risk select that that gives you an option where you can use the wizard which is what I always do but you could also have them spin up individually and you know change that way so we're going to use the wizard yes and so now it's just spinning all the motors and it's giving us a diagram showing which direction they should all be spinning so I'm just going to touch each motor to feel which way it's spinning and if you've started all your motor wires kind of straight in the same order to each ESC output you'll probably find that all four motors are spinning in the same direction and that is indeed the case here all these motors are spinning counterclockwise and you see on the diagram we do want motors two and three spinning counterclockwise but motors one and four we want spinning clockwise so at the bottom here I guess we just click one click one you'll see it change stop spinning so it stops and changes direction so you select the motors that you need to switch and now just double check it they're all spinning the same direction so basically the front motors two and four are spinning inward toward the nose of the drone and the back motors one and three are spinning inward towards the tail of the drone that's how we set up all our five inch freestyle drones which is the default motor direction we do have our ducted drones spin with props out so all the directions are essentially reversed we just find on the ducted it kind of helps a little bit but it's personal preference you could do outward spinning props on five inch some pilots like that you can do inward spinning props on so whoops it's a personal preference thing so yeah we've just closed out of that but one thing I like to do just as a sanity check is come over here to the right side of the screen and manually spin up each of the motors just to make sure that motor one is where you know it says it's supposed to be over here and that it is spinning the right direction so I'll just click on motor one and I'm going to use the keypad here to spin that motor up okay and yeah I can see that the back right motor is spinning as it should be the other reason why it's a good idea to double check things by spinning up the motors manually is you can check that the R and the E numbers are changing so when you're spinning up the motors you should see the actual RPM indicated by the R value and you should see that the E value is very low basically be zero if you have anything in the E which is the error it means you probably have set up the number of motor poles wrong or there's some other problem with the communication between your fly controller and the ESC and reading the RPM which means that that RPM filter that we mentioned that we're going to set up a little bit later will not work at all so you want to make sure that when you spin up these motors you see zero error and it doesn't hurt to you know spin them up then actually so spicy make sure uh you're not hearing anything weird nah right yeah you don't want to hear any crunching no noises things like that but yeah I'll spin up each of the motors in order so we've got one two three and four everything looks all of them are spinning all of them spun up in the correct order all of them are spinning in the right direction we've got zero error things are looking great great so from there stop the motors so now with all the motor settings now we can return to the PID settings because we'll have access to that RPM filter we mentioned we'd actually unplug the battery at this point in the setup process you're not going to really need to mess with much here because the defaults from beta flight are kind of based around your standard five inch drone okay so if you're flying a drone with five inch propellers you don't need to change the thing the drone is going to fly in fact we recommend that you do fly it on defaults don't use one of the presets right out of the gate don't try to PID tune it right out of the gate just try and fly it and make sure everything works and then from there you can dial it in so the PID controller is the control loop for correcting the drone's error an error comes from if the drone is knocked from an external force like wind or if you give a stick man so essentially what happens is the drone will be at say this angle and either it gets bumped by the wind and now it needs to correct back to that angle or you give it a stick input and it says oh I'm supposed to be over here and I'm over here so I need to correct for that so correcting for that error is done by the PID controller and the different terms the P and I and the D control how that correction is made essentially the proportional is how strongly does the drone react to error the integral is how sensitive is it to external forces like wind or the center of gravity being off and the derivative can be thought of as like a dampening effect right so yeah when it when it corrects for some error the P will put it over here and if it overshoots then it'll oscillate and then you kind of get that like the D is kind of like a dampener where it won't overshoot it'll just go right to where it needs to be to change those settings it's really nice this newer version of beta flight has different sliders for the tracking which is the P in the eye that I mentioned the dampening which is the D gain and then stick response which is a new F term which tries to provide a little bit of separation for how the drone responds to error induced from external forces like wind and error induced from your stick inputs right so you can have essentially a different reaction for intentional error that you've input and external error yes and there's another thing too with expert mode that when enabled unlocks a lot more sliders do you mess with those I personally just do the first three and if I find that the drone isn't responsive enough I will just increase this slider if I have some of that like kind of thing I was talking about I dampen that out if I want the stick to be more responsive without messing up other aspects of the tune I'd play with the fee for it but honestly I end up pretty dang close to defaults pretty much default for me but you go a little bit more in depth you hit the advanced sliders what all do you do typically I will automatically take the D max dampening slider all the way down because there I don't think that your D should have a dynamic change happening you'll see that that they've got derivative and D max and what beta flight is doing is it's varying D depending on how much it thinks you need I do like using the dynamic D gain but you don't you just turn it all the way down yeah just makes things a little bit simpler for me I'm not worrying about things changing on the D gain other than that though I throw that all the way down and I mostly mess with the master multiplier because the relationship between D gain and P gain stock at 1.0 for the most part on most of our builds is pretty great it's and I'll just you know bump it up and down on the master slider for the most part other than that there's also this drift wobble slider that comes in handy a lot as you're flying smooth forward flight if you're noticing weird bobbles things wobbles you can just slide that down or up but generally you want to this number here or the you want this slider to be as high as possible without any issues so then in addition to the sliders that control the PID values themselves we've also got some other PID controller settings you can adjust some of the more specific functions of feed forward I never touched that I leave it factory and I wouldn't touch these either unless you're digging into black box recordings things like that I would leave your feed forward settings up to presets to change those that would be based on the receiver that you're using oh okay so if you're using crossfire that's when I would go into the presets tab so if you wanted to get specific about different receivers you can find different feed forward settings that kind of take into account how fast you receive or talk to the fly controller you've also got iterm relax which tries to keep your iterm from overshooting I will mess with the iterm relax and it has to do with something called iterm wind up okay which a good way of knowing what that is is say you're doing a fast full 360 degree flip and you get like this big bounce back from that right which isn't a P bounce back a P bounce back is usually more like do do do an iterm bounce back is more of like a exactly right so messing with the cutoff number here by bringing that down if I get that iterm wind up will help will help that there's also anti gravity that actually boosts your iterm with fast throttle movement so what you might find is that when you rapidly move your throttle the nose of your drone might bounce a bit so you can either increase the iterm in general which might cause other problems like wind up or a stiff feeling so if you have that bouncing you can increase your iterm values but that might create like an overly stiff feeling or create that wind up issue we're just talking about so a way you can address just that nose bouncing without creating other eye problems is to adjust the anti gravity settings again I think the defaults are pretty good usually I most of our builds I end up bumping up to around five or six okay bigger seven inch builds or builds that don't have as much power to weight ratio those might be 10 but oh wow yeah so you can you can play with a lot what I've noticed too is with anti gravity if you go too high the problem actually comes back oh okay so there's a sweet spot it's an L curve yes iterm rotation do you ever touch that never touch iterm rotation it's mostly for line of sight pilots that's just something that helps the iterm do some stuff if you're doing like a lot of constant yawing that's not something you do with FPV don't worry about that and what about dynamic dampening now you turned that off right yes and by doing bringing the dynamic dampening all the way down does that for you right so those settings won't even do anything on yours I leave the dynamic dampening slider on default and I also leave those settings on default so moving down the throttle boost that is another one that I never mess with I mean unless you're digging into black box logs things like that I would just leave it at default but below that the motor output limit this one can be very useful if say you want to tame your motors out a little bit you can just bring this number down so at 100 your motors out are 100% power and you can drop them down from there say the high kv is just a little bit too much you could bring it to 95 90% it's nice you put on some like kind of training wheels right yes also if you're using high kv on a 6s motor oh so that's how you handle it if you okay so if you plug in a 6s motor on to say drip motors which are 2650 kv that's way too high for 6s so you can limit the output so that you get effectively a lower kv and there's things you can do right below this here with the cell count for auto profile switching so that's really cool because the flight controller can read the voltage of the battery and determine is it a 4s or a 6s and it can switch head settings based on that voltage including your throttle limit so we set up all the drones that we build here with that stuff set up so that if you buy a 4s drone and plug in a 6s battery you're not going to fry motors that's a little bit more advanced we're not really going to get into that right now so let's I guess move on over to rates on to the rates tab yes rate profile settings so this is all personal preference again stock rates are totally fine the rates define how the drone responds to stick commands so you can see that graph right there along the x-axis is your stick input and along the y-axis is the response of the drone so if you had it linear moving your throttle halfway from the middle position to the fully deflected position would essentially give you half of the maximum amount of rotation that the drone would ever be set up to do but you can see it's not linear we've got kind of an exponential curve well so at center stick you don't necessarily want it to be linear not everyone I guess it's like you said personal preference but at center stick typically you'd like it to be a little bit mushier and smoother right so if you're just making little corrections the drone isn't overshooting exactly and you're not jittery and things like that when you're trying to fly smooth right but if you do move the stick all the way to the end because you're trying to do a snappy Rubik's cube it can ramp up and give you a higher total rotation so yeah there's different settings and there's also different types of rate there's actual there's Betaflight style and that's all going to be personal preference and the only way you can figure it out is to play with different rates and see what feels good to you one thing I would encourage you to do is don't go too high with your rates you know you see some pilots ramp their rates way up because it seems really cool to be able to like spin the drone really fast but it makes it harder to do more controlled movements I'd say start on low rates a lot of really talented pilots fly very low rates I mean van over he can only flip the drone like this fast I mean he he does not do any real snappy stuff it's all personal preference just play with what you want to do I also do something really weird I make my yaw more linear because I have a little experience with a collective pitch helicopters and it was kind of common to have a very linear response on yaw so I make my yaw more of a straight line because you don't use a whole lot of yaw with FPV anyway you don't have to get into all that the defaults are fine right what do you fly I fly close to van over rates so I typically come down and I've noticed too with actual rates it's made things a little bit easier to understand which is nice that they're defaults so you've got your center sensitivity here if you want want it more sensitive you can bump it up if you want it a little bit more mushy you can bring that number down right and it's just a little bit simpler to explain but then you can set that maximum rate separately right so you can just basically say using the max rate inputs how fast do you ever want the drone to spin and then in the center sensitivity setting how do you want it to feel when you're doing smaller inputs exactly just make those two adjustments and leave it alone if you wanted some extra expo added on you could do that as well that's an additional center sensitivity I don't even know why when you're using actual rates you need to have both of them but should we make quick adjustments I guess other than that you have the tpa and tpa break point I would leave those at stock settings tpa stands for throttle pit attenuation and what that does is the more throttle you give it past a certain point set by the break point it starts to reduce your pit values and doing that prevents the drone from getting over reactive when you're giving it a lot of power usually the default settings are fine I never mess with the default settings really unless it's a different craft that's not your standard five inch build for the most part though the stock settings are completely fine but once you've got your settings everything's saved or dialed in you would just come down here hit save and move on to the filters settings the filters are what clean up the motor noise and just the noises that are coming from your craft so the fly controller can detect every little bit of movement going on with your drone whether that's it's actually rotating or that the motors are spinning and vibrating the frame the fly controller will see that and the filters help the fly controller be prevented from perceiving that vibration as movement and reacting to it so you've got low pass filters which allow everything lower than a set frequency to pass through and you can think about that would work very well for motor vibrations because they're spinning very fast it's going to be some sort of very high frequency vibration you want the fly controller to ignore that and you only want it to be detecting what are going to be relatively low frequency movements I mean even if you're rotating the drone at 660 degrees per second that's still a much lower frequency movement than a prop spinning at thousands of rpm so again with this newer version of Betaflight you've got sliders for the filters you can keep the setup very simple if you think that the drone is overreacting to vibrations which I mean how would you usually see that show up either in black box recordings or just in your actual fbv feed okay so you're seeing vibrations you can also hear it right hearing that's the other thing too if you've got your quad you know just an arm and you're hearing weird crunchy or grinding motors that's a sign that your filters or some other settings might be off yeah so if you're just trying to hover it and you see the drone like jiggling and going crazy it could be something with your pins but if those are stock it also might be something with your filters so you could just very simply grab this slider and move it to more filtering if you want the drone to be as responsive as possible you actually want to slide the filters towards less filtering it's going to make the drone react quicker the problem is more noise is going to get through so pilots that are trying to tune their drone for the kind of highest level of responsiveness will basically move that slider as low as possible without inducing some of those weird vibrations personally I go a little more filtering because I want to be able to not have to worry about is it more humid today and the air is thicker did I clip a branch and now my prop is slightly out of balance I want a little more filtering to give me a larger tolerance for the condition of drone the conditions of weather and the conditions of the drone that I can fly it typically for someone who's not experienced with tuning filters I would suggest that if you're going to move the sliders in any direction to move both the gyro filter multiplier and the de-term filter multiplier together so as you change those sliders you'll see the numbers in the low-pass filters fields changing I think using the filters is fine both for the PIDs and the filters if you want to get advanced you could go in there and type in numbers manually but usually the sliders are pretty good and typically the default settings on the sliders or for the 1.0 on the sliders is great for most of our five inch builds moving down to the notch filters the other thing that you want to check is this rpm filter setting do you change any of the settings in the rpm filter typically no okay the stock settings are great for our standard builds I'm not going to mess with them usually I just want to verify that they are active though here and that everything's checked and turned on one thing when the gyro rpm filter is turned on if it's doing its job correctly the way that it's supposed to you really don't need this gyro low-pass filter anymore oh really okay yeah so when I have rpm filter set up and everything's working correctly typically what I'll do is just turn this off right here so you leave the second one on though correct I'll leave the low-pass two on but I don't need the dynamic filter changing so got you you can remove that completely on a clean build I mean I need to leave it on but you know again he's trying to squeeze out all the performance make the drones fly ultra fuego try it out see what happens you know if your motors get a little hot toasty you know turn it back on exactly again another way to think about if you need more or less filtering like we talked about how it might sound you also feel the motors again once you've stopped the props it's normal for the motors to be warm even borderline borderline hot but like if they're like too hot like if you grab it you're like that's too hot you probably need to increase your filtering or maybe your pins are way off so warm motors are fine but if they're getting really scorching hot you're going to want to fix your your configuration before you start burning them up and rooting them exactly because if you nick a prop at that point or if anything happens no tolerance you've got no tolerance exactly you're going to end up smoking something think about pin tuning and filter settings is there's so much that can be done with it it really is a whole video topic in itself we have made videos about pins and filters before so you could check out some of those but really you can get away with using default or close to default and you're just going to have to play and experiment but if you're flying one of our drones they've come pre-tuned by the master himself or if you've built one of our drones we'll have screenshots available or hit up our support email and we can we can send you some settings to use we've got all our pins we've got our rates we've got our filter set we can hit save and we can move on we've already done the receiver and we can go into modes now yes we can go into modes back into the modes tab it's going to be a lot easier to set this up if the receiver is powered some flight controllers will actually power the receiver from the USB but a lot of times that's not the case and that's not the case with this one so we need to plug in our battery again so we've got our green light back on on our receiver which means our crossfire is talking so now it's going to make assigning the switch a lot easier it's really convenient if you handle the binding and get everything set up before you do the modes because this is where you assign different switches to do different functions on the flight controller and if you've got it linked up you can actually you can actually do it by moving the actual switch right exactly you don't have to manually do things you can let the radio do it for you so arm that's the most important switch that you need assigned all you're going to do is hit add range right here in the dropdown set to auto so let's see what switch do we want to use this is yeah this is our arm switch when you move this switch it set it to aux one and so now when you move this switch you guys see that tick mark moving so basically I'll just put this switch in the position that I want the drone to be armed in there and then you move that bar to be at a range where the tick mark is so now when I flip the switch to the other position the tick mark moves outside of that bar meaning the drone is disarmed and when I put it there it will be armed other switches that we set up angle mode so same thing you're just going to add range the switch that we use put that all the way there yep same thing again it's really nice to have angle mode what angle mode is is an auto level mode so normally when you're flying a freestyle drone you're flying it in acro mode which means that you have full control over the drone you can hold the stick all the way deflect it and it will flip over when you return the stick to center the drone will stay at whatever angle you left it at you have to manually put it at whatever angle in the air you want to fly it at but with angle mode it won't let you move the drone past a certain point you can just kind of like hold forward and it will just stay at a constant pitch and when you return the stick to center the drone will return to center so you can think of angle mode as an auto level mode and it is nice to have on a switch so that you know maybe in the event of a crash where it feels like you're spinning out you can flip it and know that the drone is going to try and level itself out or if you need to do like an emergency line of sight landing it can be a lot easier to do that with an angle mode when the drone is like kind of far away so it's I think it's good to have angle mode on a switch another thing to keep in mind is you can assign multiple things to the same switch so like what I do on my quads I mentioned air mode earlier as I will have the same switch control the different flight mode so I would have one position be angle mode then I'd have the middle position be an acro mode with air mode off and then I'd have the final position be air mode enabled so three positions for three different flight modes again we have air mode permanently enabled so we're using the three position switch as just an on off switch it's either acro air mode or angle mode you'll see below angle mode is horizon mode don't ever use that one it's similar to angle mode but it will let you flip if you move the stick too far I don't think it's a good idea it teaches you bad habits I think it's kind of unsafe if you're going to use an auto level mode you should use angle mode not horizon mode moving down the list the next one I would add is the beeper that we set up on the configuration for that rx set so what switch do we use for that would be the back right this one here yes oh so on this radio it's a momentary switch right so I can hold it up here just yep and then that's kind of nice because it only beeps when I'm holding the switch correct yeah is the flip over after crash aka turtle mode if you ever hear someone refer to turtle mode that's what beta flight calls flip over after crash it's a really great feature and what it does is when you go into this mode is it switches the directions of the motors so that you can move the pitch and roll stick and spin two of the motors so that you can flip the drone over without having to walk over to it so which switch do we use for flip over front one right there this one yep all the way down all the way down there we go yep I'll just slide this over so you've got everything set up when you hit save yes and now that we've actually saved our settings we can test them right like so if I move the beeper switch it actually starts beeping if I move the arm switch it doesn't work beta flight is smart it's not going to let you arm it but still even though beta flight has these safety things in place if it messes up and lets you arm it you better have your props off so yeah we've saved that the last piece that we'll need to set up is going to be our on-screen display there's a couple of different ways that this works if you have built an analog drone what you would need to have done is intercepted the video signal wire that goes from the camera to the transmitter and soldered to the video in and video out pads on the fly controller and what that does is it allows the fly controller to intercept the analog video signal and overlay different elements on your video feed so if you're setting up that analog system you can turn on different things that you want to show and just drag them to where you want it to be and it will and how you set it up on the screen will match what you see in the goggles however if you're setting up a digital system things work a little bit differently we mentioned that msp connection the air unit is going to use that msp connection to generate an on-screen display just using some of the information so the air unit is going to use that msp connection to generate on-screen display elements but what that means is not all of these elements are available so like you can't actually have that compass things show up so you'll just have to play and see what you can actually use but most all of the essential elements are going to work so things like your low voltage warning your craft name so we can go ahead and turn those on and drag them to where we want them to be yes and another thing you can do is if you already have your goggles bound to the to the air unit you can in real time see what's happening and make adjustments yeah that's a good thing because I found that where you drag it on the display screen doesn't always line up exactly with what you see in the dji goggles for the drones here at rotor riot we usually just use craft name I bring that to the bottom we don't want you to forget your flying that beautiful skyliner we do battery voltage which is the total voltage of your battery I like to throw that in the top left hand corner here and right above that we also do the battery average cell voltage which shows the individual voltage of each cell and for me and most pilots that's really all you need yeah other things that you know I sometimes have turned on would be like the the current value so you could actually see it full throttle I'm drawing 90 amps baby you'll need it but you know you could also turn on maybe different timers and things like that but I agree for the most part it's just good to have that the warning thing that came on by default it'll tell you if there's some problem that it was able to detect put on the craft name for style points and your battery voltage and that's that's all you should really need to know but you can try different settings and things like that yeah play around it's all subjective so whatever works well for you you know just play around and throw them in there once you're done you'll just hit save we're pretty much ready for a test flight there are some other things in here yeah so there's the video transmitter tab now if you're using an analog system and you're planning on using the fly controller to set the channel of your video transmitter there's some settings that you can get into here yes and it was I know it was a big deal with older firmwares where you had to figure out your VTX table and things like that but with these presets they've made it really simple you can just a lot of cool things can happen in the presets so yeah thankfully we're using a digital system we don't need to worry about that the black box tab is for setting up a recording black box data which would actually give you the gyro data of a flight that you performed and that is that's a tool that you use if you really want to like tune things to like super precise but we don't need to do that today this is just a basic setup and then beyond that is the CLI tab and so in the command line interface this is where you can type in some very advanced settings if you do want to set up on the avatar system canvas mode there's a couple of things that you'll need to do in the CLI but we're not going to cover that today we don't need to do anything in the CLI today so this drone is ready to go right it is throw the top plate and some props on it that's very very important that you go out to an open area outdoors to do your test hover so in all seriousness it's way better idea to do this outside but you know we've got the camera already set up a safe way to test things out before actually applying any throttle is to arm your drone and don't actually add any throttle just push forward on the pitch stick and you should see the back two motors lift up looking good okay we'll go right on the roll stick and we should see the left two motors lift up all good there and we can even test yaw right we can just give it a little bit of yaw and see it rotate so if there were any problems if one of the motors is spinning the wrong way if the motor was out of order if the sticks were sign wrong if the directions of the channel was incorrect any problem at all we would have seen it having done that like 99% sure everything is good to go so again outside in your safe open area you can arm the drone give it a little bit of throttle and there you go we are test flying drone it's looking good guys hope you learned something today if you did if you had a good time hit the like button to let us know that this helped you out if you're new here hit the subscribe button guys i'm ladrib i'm grues and we'll see you next time on Rotorad