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Betaflight is complicated and hard to understand, and setting up a quadcopter with Betaflight is really difficult. If you feel that way, this video is for you. I've done videos in the past where I take you through the steps of setting up
Complete walkthrough of Betaflight 4.3 installation, flashing firmware, and setup with expert tips for quadcopter configuration.
Key Takeaways
- Betaflight Configurator installation and setup can be complex but is manageable with step-by-step guidance.
- Using the correct USB cable and drivers is critical for successful flight controller connection.
- Flashing firmware updates improves flight controller performance and fixes bugs but requires backing up settings first.
- Expert Mode unlocks advanced settings necessary for thorough quadcopter configuration.
- Troubleshooting connection issues early prevents common setup frustrations.
Summary
- Introduction to Betaflight and the complexity of setting up quadcopters using Betaflight Configurator.
- Step-by-step guide to downloading and installing Betaflight Configurator, including version recommendations.
- Explanation of connecting flight controllers via USB and troubleshooting common connection issues like USB cables and drivers.
- Instructions on enabling Expert Mode and Dark Mode in Betaflight Configurator for advanced configuration options.
- How to identify the correct COM port and connect to the flight controller successfully.
- Detailed walkthrough of flashing firmware to the flight controller, including what firmware flashing means and why it’s important.
- Guidance on backing up current flight controller configuration before updating firmware.
- Tips on handling different operating systems and driver installation, especially for Windows versions prior to Windows 10.
- Overview of using the Firmware Flasher tab and selecting the correct target and custom defaults for the flight controller.
- Initial setup steps after flashing, such as calibrating sensors and ensuring GPS and battery voltage indicators work correctly.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction to Betaflight and video overview
- 02:00Downloading and installing Betaflight Configurator
- 03:54Connecting flight controller and COM port detection
- 05:53Driver installation and troubleshooting USB connection
- 07:46Flashing firmware: what it is and why it matters
- 09:45Backing up configuration before firmware update
- 11:47Bootloader mode and initial connection indicators
- 13:51Using release candidates and unstable firmware options
- 15:55Applying custom defaults and board-specific setup
- 17:49Battery voltage, GPS setup, and sensor calibration
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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a specific quadcopter with Betaflight, and I just show you what to do and where to go. Sometimes I tell you why you're doing it, but the focus of those other videos has been you've got this quadcopter, and I'm going to set it up
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for you, and you're going to come along with me. But that doesn't help you as much if you're just trying to set up your own quadcopter. If you want to just be able to look at Betaflight Configurator and
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understand what all of the options are, that's going to be the focus of this video or video series. I might end up splitting it up into several, still not sure yet. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to install Betaflight
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Configurator, and we're just going to start on page one, and we're going to go through all the options and talk about what they are, how to set them up, what they mean, and so at the end, you'll know it all.
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I'm Joshua Bardwell. You're going to learn something today, and the first thing we got to do before we can work with Betaflight is install Betaflight Configurator. Betaflight Configurator is the app that you use to connect to and configure and flash firmware to your
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Betaflight flight controllers. You're going to do that from this URL, github.com, etc. It is down in the video description below, as well as all the other reference links that I'm going to make throughout this video. Currently, the latest version of
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Betaflight Configurator is Betaflight Configurator 10.8.0 Release Candidate 3. This is a little bit of an unusual time to be making this video because a release candidate means that a new version of Betaflight is just about to come out, and they are testing the waters
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to see if this is ready to release. That's why it's a release candidate. If you want to be a little bit safer, you can scroll back and you can download Betaflight Configurator 10.7.2, which is the last version that isn't a
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release candidate. But release candidates are usually okay, and this one specifically is okay. So I'm going to go ahead and download and install it, and I'll just click here. I can review the release notes if I want to know more
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about what's happened, or I could just keep scrolling down, and here are the assets or the installers. I am on Windows, so I'm going to choose Win64Installer.exe. I'm going to download and install it. If you're on Linux, good luck. I have no
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idea how you would install this, and if you're on macOS, I also don't know how you would install it, but I do know that on macOS, there is a specific permission, a specific security-related thing you
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have to do in order to run the installer. Unfortunately, I can't tell you more than that. Now, at this point, you should be able to run the Configurator, and yours may not look exactly like mine. For example, you may need to change your
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system language. You can do that by clicking on any of these languages down here if you'd prefer it be in some other language than what you see. I'm going to click on English because I speak English. The other thing you can do is you can
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click the options tab, and you can change a few of these options. I would like you to permanently enable Expert Mode because by the time you get done with this tutorial, you're going to be an expert just like me. That's the
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hope anyway. That's going to give us access to some options that we might not otherwise see. The other thing you might want to do is enable Dark Mode because, let's face it, all the cool kids use Dark Mode
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versus Light. Oh, my eyes! We'll enable Dark Mode. That is going to be all of the options that we're going to change for the time being. Now, the next thing I want to draw your attention to is this pull-down menu in the upper
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right, and currently you'll see that it says Manual Selection, and mine also says Virtual Mode Experimental. Yours may not say that, but what we don't see here is any COM port or serial port, and a serial port is what is used to talk to a flight
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controller. So if I take this spare flight controller that I have sitting on my bench and if I go ahead and plug it in, we will get the sound of a USB device being plugged in, and this will change to
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read COM14 STM32 Virtual COM Port in FS Mode. Now, in Windows, we see COM14. On Linux and macOS, we see something like /tty/usb, some kind of a serial port, but basically what you should see is that when you plugged in
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your flight controller, a new thing appeared here that wasn't here before. If I unplug my flight controller, the thing goes away, and that's the serial port that this flight controller is on. Here's the first piece of
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troubleshooting advice for working with Betaflight Configurator: if you plug in your flight controller and you don't see a new thing appear there, something is wrong with it. You could have a bad USB cable. This really trips up a lot of
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people. The USB cable that came with your phone probably is charge-only and doesn't carry data, and a lot of people have these charge-only USB cables floating around their house, and they're like, "I don't know why when I plug in, nothing
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happens." You got to make sure you have a generic USB cable made for data as well as power. We can see that the flight controller lit up. The flight controller is powered up. If you plugged in and it
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didn't light up, you could have a broken flight controller, you could have a USB cable that was damaged and wasn't powering the flight controller, or you could have a driver issue. If you have Linux or macOS, you should not need to
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do anything with drivers. You should just plug in and work. If you have Windows 10 or newer, I guess Windows 11 probably, I don't know, I haven't switched to Windows 11 yet. If you have Windows 10 or newer,
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you shouldn't have anything to do with drivers. It should be ready to go. You should just plug in, and you should see something like this: STM32 Virtual COM Port in FS Mode. If you have an older version of Windows 10 that you haven't
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been updating, or you have a previous version of Windows like Windows 8 or Windows 7, you will need to manually install that STM32 Virtual COM Port driver, and you do that by going to this page, and you have to download the driver.
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In order to download the driver, you have to accept this license agreement, and then you have to freaking log into this website and register, and it's a pain in the butt. I'm going to go ahead and download this file for you, and I'm
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going to put a link to it down in the video description. However, that link may not work a year from now, so you may have to go to this webpage, and you may have to manually download it yourself. So at
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this point in the video, you should be able to plug your flight controller in, and you should see a new COM port appear here. At that point, if you hit the Connect button, you should connect to your flight
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controller, and what you actually see will probably be this setup window, but it could be something else. When you hit Connect, then you get something. It connects. It doesn't give you a problem. If we disconnect, it disconnects. Good.
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You are ready to proceed. The next thing I want to show you how to do is flash firmware to your flight controller, and we're going to do that from the Firmware Flasher tab. The first thing we'll address is, like, what is it? What does it
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mean to flash firmware? You know how every so often your phone says, "Hey, we've got a new system update for you. Do you want to install it?" and then it goes through this process of installing a new
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system update, and then you've got some new features or maybe some new skins, or something has changed, maybe some security updates, maybe some bug fixes? That's what we're talking about when we talk about flashing new firmware. The developers are constantly improving
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the firmware, the computer code that runs on these flight controllers, to make them fly better, to add new features, or to fix bugs, and so you don't abs...
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controller to the latest firmware is a good first step when you first get it here's how you do that the first thing you need to do before you flash your flight controller is identify the correct target for the flight controller
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this list here where it says choose a board each of these is a target is the term that betaflight devs use for a particular flight controller and every flight controller has a particular target that is correct for it if you
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flash the wrong target to your flight controller it will not work correctly it won't be damaged you just have to flash the right target to it but you want to identify the target before you flash the simplest way to do that is to plug your
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flight controller in and then press this auto detect button and it will automatically detect the target that matches the firmware that is currently on the board importantly if you already flashed the wrong target to your board when you auto detect it will pick up the
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wrong target so always auto detect before you flash the flight controller if when you auto detect it doesn't come up with something if it just says select a board it means that whatever's on this it can't quite figure out the right
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thing and you need to pause don't flash it you're going to need to do some research to find out what the correct target is because sometimes like target names will change or there may they may have the vendor may have shipped the
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firmware with like an experimental pre-release target why do they do that they shouldn't do that but they do so sometimes you'll have to do a little research to find the correct target but in this case i hit auto detect and it
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comes up with mamba f722 i2c and that is the correct target for my board then we're going to pick a firmware version and if we click here we can see the latest version that's publicly available is 4.2.11 and then we can go ahead and
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flash it but before we flash it wait there's one more thing we need to do i'm going to connect to this flight controller and i'm going to go to the presets tab and i'm going to choose save backup and
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what that's going to do is back up all of the configuration of the flight controller as it stands right now today and the reason i want to do that before i update the firmware is this may have shipped
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from the manufacturer with some customization on it especially if this flight controller is in a bind and fly quadcopter with it'll have all custom configuration and when you flash your flight controller it wipes all that stuff out but even if you don't have a
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flight controller with customization on it it's still a good idea to save a backup just so you have documentation like what the target was and any other changes the manufacturer may have made so i'm going to hit save backup here
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it's going to give me the option to save this and i can rename this if i want to but i can just save it using this file name and hit save and now i've got a backup of that
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configuration now it is safe to flash the firmware so i'm going to go to firmware flasher i can hit auto detect let's just make sure it's reading the right one and i will then hit load firmware online and i'm going to hit the flash firmware
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button here and when i do this i want you to look up here in the upper right and i want you to see what happens when i hit flash firmware notice that that pull-down menu changed from stm32 to dfu stm32 bootloader so
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in order to flash the flight controller the configurator uses a different driver than the stm32 driver that is used to connect to and configure the flight controller the dfu bootloader driver is used to actually flash the firmware so
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if you go to flash and the flight controller doesn't enter dfu boot loader mode automatically what you need to do is identify the bootloader button on your flight controller and the bootloader button is going to look a little bit different on different flight
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controllers here's a photo of several different boot loader buttons and what they look like but the bottom line is that somewhere on the flight controller is going to be a bootloader button and what you're going to do is you're going to hold that
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bootloader button down and plug in usb now i want to just plug in usb normally and show you what that looks like because i want you to see that when you first plug your flight controller in there's going to be a status led that
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like blinks and flashes in a certain pattern that tells you basically what's going on with the flight controller but when you hold down the bootloader button and plug in usb none of that happens you just get a single red status led it's not always
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red but it'll be a single red sort of power led but the blinking status led doesn't blink and that's your sign that this flight controller is in bootloader mode and at that point you should see dfu stm32 bootloader here in your
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configurator now if you don't see that if you are sure that your flight controller is in bootloader mode but you don't see dfustm32 bootloader here on windows there is a tool that can help you fix that the tool in question is
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called impulse rc driver fixer it's available from this page and again there's a link to that in the video description you can download it right here is the link and it just downloads this file impulserc driverfixer.exe with the flight controller in bootloader
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mode you're going to run that app it's going to search for your flight controller it should then say installing dfu driver it will fix the driver and then if you power cycle the board and plug it in again in dfu mode it should work now
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i said this is a windows only thing because this is a problem that only occurs with windows drivers if you're on mac os and linux it just should always work and if it's not working i actually have no
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idea how to troubleshoot it because it basically just always works except like the one time it doesn't work and then i don't know how to help you at this point we have installed betaflight configurator we've backed up the
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configuration of the flight controller as it was from the factory and we have flashed the latest version of betaflight technically we didn't flash the latest version of betaflight we flashed 4.2 i told you already there's a we're in the
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release candidate window i kind of would like to flash the release candidate if you ever feel like being adventuresome and flashing something that isn't quite out yet you can enable show unstable releases and if you show unstable releases you will gain access to both
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releases and release candidates now there aren't always release candidates available only right in the weeks and months before a new version comes out we are actually in that window and we can see rc3 right here if you really feel
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adventuresome you can enable expert mode and you can actually flash development releases like that are full of new features and bugs i don't recommend this unless you're a developer but it is there and i kind of wanted to point it out to you
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let's go ahead and flash release candidate 3 which is what i'm running on most of my builds and i'm also going to do a full chip erase here which will just wipe the configuration of the board out like make sure it's just make sure
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it's fully wiped when we go to the new version load firmware flash firmware now that we've done all that the next thing we're going to do is actually connect to the flight controller and start configuring it but before we do that could i ask you to go
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down and hit the like button it helps the video succeed helps youtube know that you're enjoying the video and helps more people see it thanks so much it means a lot next thing we're going to do is hit connect and start looking at the
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configuration of the flight controller and the very first screen that we see here is incredibly important you see when you flash a flight controller it doesn't complete the configuration of the flight controller and i don't mean configuration of the flight controller
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like talking to your receiver or having your pids or your rates what i mean is that the flight controller is actually not even fully functioning at the time when you finish flashing it there are some parts of the betaflight code
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that are the same for every flight controller and there are some parts of the betaflight code that are different for every for for different flight controllers and when you flash the flight controller it flashes the part that is the same for every flight
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controller and that's known as the generic target the next thing you need to do to complete the configuration which is called the board specific parts or the board specific target is to press this apply custom defaults button and i
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know the term custom are the defaults are they custom the bottom line is that every time you flash a flight controller the next time you plug in you must press apply custom defaults to complete the configuration of flight controller and
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finish the flash and make it fully functional there are rare cases where you might not see that pop-up or where you might not need to do that but in general that is almost always going to be the case
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now that we have applied custom defaults if we then hit connect we see another warning and these warnings we're going to take care of as part of the setup but it's just letting you know that you absolutely can't fly
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the flight controller until you go through these steps so we'll just close that warning and we're going to start here in the setup tab and we'll just take a look around at the interface and the first thing you're going to see is
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on the left side of the screen here are the individual they call them tabs of the interface and each of these is a different set of configuration options and we're going to go through these and look at what they all do
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up here we've got some status readouts that we can scroll through mostly this would be useful to developers or if you were troubleshooting an issue and generally you're not going to be spending too much time looking at this
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here in the upper upper left very important information the version number of the configurator and the version number of the firmware and the target or board name that we're using if you were trying to troubleshoot an issue with me for example a lot of times
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i would say what version of betaflight do you have and what version of the configurator are you using and this is the information that i'm looking for 1080 and 430 and your target name is as shown here you could just even take a
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little picture of this and send it to me as we come across the top of the screen here there is an indication of what our battery voltage is if we actually had a quadcopter and we actually had a battery plugged into the
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quadcopter we'd get a readout here of what our battery voltage is it helps you keep from running your battery down if you've got a quad plugged in while you're working on it on the bench and these three indicators show the serial
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link status that is the usb connection to the flight controller right now if this icon is going in and out you're going to get a slow stuttery you might have a bad usb cable or something like that fail-safe mode whether the flight
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controller is in fail-safe mode right now we'll talk more about fill safe mode later and motor arming if you the motors were armed right now it would well you'd also know the motors were armed because the motors would be spinning but there's
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also a little indication here next we've got the sensor indicators and these indicate what sensors the flight controller is talking to right now the most basic ones are the gyro and the accelerometer those are built in to a
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chip that is on the flight controller and they're used to detect the movement and attitude and orientation of the flight controller and if those aren't working then pretty much your quadcopter can't fly you can fly without an accelerometer but not without a gyro
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pretty much always those should be lit up when you're looking at a flight controller next we have magnetometer or compass many flight controllers especially betaflight quads won't have a compass on them it's more common on gps quads running
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operating systems like inav but betaflight can use a compass and if you have one it'll be lit up here barometer which tells you altitude gps which tells you gps coordinates and sonar betaflight can actually use a sonar sensor well that's actually
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not really true it used to be able to but it kind of can't now but in theory you could have a sonar sensor hooked up and it could be basically not doing anything any sensors that you think the quad
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should have should be lit up in yellow here if you have installed a gps on your quad and you don't see gps lit up in yellow here something is wrong and your gps isn't working and that's basically how
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we use this troubleshooting as we continue across the top here we'll see the data flash section and you may not see dataflash you may see no data flash chip found and a lot of people see that and they think there's something wrong
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with their flight controller many flight controllers don't have a data flash chip so if you see no data flash chip found it probably just means your flight controller doesn't have a data flash chip what's the data flash chip used for
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it is used to store black box information your flight controller can store information like the black box of an airplane and then if you need to troubleshoot problems or tune the quadcopter you can use that black box information for that purpose
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one way that black box information is stored is in a data flash chip on the flight controller there are other ways that it can be stored we'll talk more about that later if you see data flash free it means you have a data flash chip
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and you have some free space in it if you see no data flash chip found it means you don't have one and that's probably you probably aren't supposed to have one enable expert mode we actually turned that on from the options you'll see that
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when we disable expert mode some of the tabs go away and the tabs that go away theoretically beginners shouldn't need to deal with but how'd you turn that on and we're going to leave that on update firmware will take us out of this disconnect from
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the flight controller and take us over to the firmware flashing screen we can just see that happen right now and we can connect and we can go right back in and of course we've got the connect and disconnect button down here
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at the bottom of the screen we'll see port utilization and packet error these statistics relate to the usb connection between the flight controller and the computer and probably you'll never look at them again if you were to see a lot
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of packet errors it could mean you had a bad usb cable for example i2c errors a lot of people freak out when they see that they're oh 16 i2c errors is this a big deal no it's not a
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big deal i2c or i squared c is technically how people insist that you're supposed to say it but i think that's dumb i2c is an interface that's used to talk to uh sensors like it's typically used to talk to a
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magnetometer or a barometer if you had them typically when i2c first powers up you'll get a few errors like you see here and then you won't see any more so if you see a small number of i2c errors
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and the number is not increasing then that's normal and you can ignore it if you were to see a large number of i2c errors scrolling up you would you might have a problem with your flight controller cycle time and cpu load
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relate to how hard the processor is working and the rule of thumb here is that we want to see a cpu load assuming we're running betaflight 4.3 or newer we want to see a cpu load of less than
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about 75 or 80 percent so here we've got a cpu load of 32 percent that is well within that margin if your cpu load is too high what will happen is that the flight controller will stop doing things
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that it thinks are non-essential and focus on flying the quad and that may mean that it stops some things stop working and you're kind of like what's wrong here just don't run it with the cpu load higher than 70 or 80 percent
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and later we're gonna see in the configuration screen exactly what we would change if the cpu load was too high next let's go through the setup screen and we'll start here in the upper left with these buttons the very first button
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is calibrate accelerometer and the accelerometer is the sensor that tells the flight controller which direction is up the accelerometer detects the direction of gravity or well any acceleration but gravity is an acceleration and since it doesn't start out knowing which
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direction is up you have to calibrate the accelerometer so what you're going to do is you're going to take your quadcopter and you're going to set it flat on a table that's reasonably level and then you're going to hit calibrate
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accelerometer and when that's done now it will know which way is up and you should see that if you tilt the quadcopter or the flight controller it moves the 3d model there moves consistent with how you are tilting it
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if you have a compass you can hit the calibrate magnetometer button but the problem is that calibrating the compass requires you to hold and turn and move it in a certain pattern that would be difficult to do if you were plugged into
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usb in addition calibrating the compass requires you to do it out away from large metal objects and electrical fields so in other words you're pretty much never going to calibrate the magnetometer by clicking this button there's another way to
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initiate the process of calibrating the magnetometer using other use that you can do in the field i'll put a link down below to my video about how to calibrate and align the magnetometer i'm not going to go into that now
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especially because betaflight quads almost never have magnetometers anyway so that'll be a link down in the video description for further reading the reset settings button is incredibly misleading it says that it will restore your settings to defaults and the reason
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this is misleading is because let's say you bought a bind and fly quadcopter and it came from the manufacturer ready to go it's all set up and you fly it then maybe one day you decide you want to reset it to default
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so you hit that button and it wipes the configuration back to the beta flight defaults not the manufacturer's defaults in other words all of that customization that the manufacturer did is gone and the whole damn thing is just a rock now
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and doesn't work so don't hit the reset settings button thinking that it'll reset it to like emacs iflight diatone geprc all these bind and fly quads don't think that it'll reset the manufacturer's defaults if you need to reset the
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manufacturer's defaults you need to go to the presets tab and you need to load backup and you need to load that backup that you saved and if you didn't save a backup of your configuration you should do that and you
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should keep it somewhere where you'll know where it is so that when you screw things up in the future if when you can just load that back up and get your configuration back reset settings wipes the board back to betaflight
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defaults still need to do that sometimes finally we've got this button activate bootloader dfu which takes us back out and activates dfu mode you can also just hit update firmware and it'll automatically do it now we're in dfu
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mode how do i get back out of dfu mode if i go to the firmware flasher tab i've got this button here exit dfu mode it'll put us back in the normal mode let's continue working our way around
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this screen we can see right here that we've got a heading a pitch and a roll readout the pitch and the roll readout are in degrees and show the number of degrees of tilt from a vertical where 0
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degrees is flat and 90 degrees is vertical and 180 degrees is upside down you may also notice that we've got a heading readout and sure enough if i rotate this guy the heading readout is in fact showing a change in the heading
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which is going to be a little confusing because we don't have a compass here so how does it know the heading if we don't have a compass and the answer is that it doesn't if you have a compass then when you
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power up the flight controller it figures out which direction north is and it gives you your correct heading well it doesn't compensate for magnetic declination if you're concerned about that but it gives you your compass heading if you don't have a compass when you
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first power up the flight controller it assumes that whichever way it's facing is north and then based on the gyro reading it can tell what its rotation is and it will do its best guess as to what direction it's
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facing based on that initial readout so if you activate uh the compass readout in your on-screen display it will show you north but without a compass that's not actually going to be facing true north unless you made a point of turning
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to face north at the moment that you plugged your quadcopter in in which case it kind of would a lot of people don't understand the function of this reset z-axis button and this button has no effect on how the
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quadcopter flies all this button does is take this 3d model right here and make it face out away from you so what you can do is you can take your quadcopter i wish i had a real quadcopter i just have a flight
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controller you can rotate it so it's facing away from you into the screen and you can hit the z-axis button and now the quad on screen will match the quad in real life that's all this button is for that's it continuing around the
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screen the info line contains some basic information about the quad like the battery voltage how many milliamp hours you have drawn from the battery how many amps you are currently drawing from the battery and your rssi or signal strength
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of your receiver in some cases these are going to read zero for example currently we don't have a battery plugged in many quadcopters will not be set up to measure current and so the amp or milliamp hour readout may be zero uh in
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in other cases the current sensor may not be calibrated so the amp and milliamp hour reading may be wild you may show that you're pulling 10 amps just sitting here on the bench with nothing happening because it's miscalibrated
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the voltage is usually pretty accurate and usually works the rssi may or may not work depending on what type of receiver you've got and how it's set up so you may see zero percent there or you may see a number but by far the most
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important information in the info column is the arming disable flags and the reason this is important is because this is a list of reasons why the flight controller will refuse to arm at this point in time and if any of these arming
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disabled flags are present your quad won't arm that's a big deal because you're like i've set up my quadcopter i'm ready to go fly you plug it in you set it down you put your goggles on you go to fly click you arm and nothing
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happens and now what what you do next is you get your list of arming disabled flags and there's various places you can get them but one of the places is here in the info display so you can see here the arming
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disable flags that are currently active include rx failsafe angle and msp and in fact if i hover over them i can get a little bit of a readout of what they mean however i've got a whole playlist of
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videos i made on how to find the arming disabled flags and then for each arming disabled flag how to troubleshoot the problem i'll put a link to that playlist down in the video description and if you're ever stuck with a quadcopter that
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won't arm that's where you should go to troubleshoot it if we have a gps and we have a gps fix we'll get gps readout here we've got some cute little instruments as if we were an airplane that's adorable but completely pointless and
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then we've got the experimental backup and restore which you should pretend doesn't exist and never never use it if you need to backup and restore your config go to the presets tab and use save backup and load backup next we're
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going to go to the ports tab and we're going to start configuring all of the uarts on this flight controller oh what are those i'm going to tell you in the next video in this series if you're interested in going to the next video in
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this series i'm going to put a card on screen for that as well i'm going to put a card on screen for this whole playlist all the videos in this series are in a playlist and you can easily go there and find the one
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that you're looking for see you there
Topics:BetaflightBetaflight Configuratorquadcopter setupfirmware flashingflight controllerUSB connectionExpert Modedrone configurationfirmware updateJoshua Bardwell
