Betaflight 4.3 Ports Tab | | COMPLETE WALKTHROUGH PART 2 — Transcript

Welcome back to my Betaflight 4.3 Configurator walkthrough. In this video series, I'm going through every single option in Betaflight Configurator so you'll know what it does and how to set it up. This is a video series because it's a lot of content. This is video number two in the series. If you are looking for the series as a whole, there is a link to the playlist down in the video description. And if you stumbled upon this video for some reason, get what you need from this video, but then I highly encourage you to go back to video number one and start from scratch and just learn it all. In this video, we are going to go through the Ports tab. Let's get into it. In order to understand the Ports tab, let's take an example flight controller, like, oh, I don't know, my own JB F7 flight controller. And we're going to look at the wiring diagram for this flight controller. And there's stuff that you got to hook up to a flight controller that has to communicate with the flight controller. Stuff like the DJI video transmitter, which uses serial communication to send information about battery voltage, on-screen display, and other such things. Or like your receiver. Your receiver sends digital data to the flight controller that tells it what you're doing with your sticks. Or your video transmitter. Your video transmitter, yes, it sends video signals through the flight controller, and that's not a digital serial communication, but it also does Smart Audio, which is how the flight controller can tell the video transmitter what channel it should be on or what output power should be on. The point is that there are various peripheral devices that we connect to our flight controller, and the flight controller needs an interface to communicate with those devices. And those interfaces are called UARTs. And you can see a list of the UARTs on this flight controller here in the Ports tab. Now, if we look on Wikipedia, we can see that UART stands for Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter, and you can go read that Wikipedia page if you want to, no more in depth. But the point is a UART on a flight controller is, it's kind of like a USB port. It's something that you attach a peripheral to that the flight controller is going to communicate with. So here in the Ports tab, we see the UARTs that this flight controller has, and they are numbered one, two, three, four, five, six. They are usually, but not always, sequential. Some flight controllers might have a missing UART. It might, they might go one, two, four, five, six, or whatever. That's a decision made by the designer of the flight controller. Don't be surprised or think anything's wrong if you see one is missing. And for each of these UARTs, we are going to tell the flight controller what type of peripheral device is attached to that UART, and we're going to do that by adjusting these options here. Now, when we set up the flight controller, we're going to connect each peripheral to some UART TX and RX pads on the flight controller. So each UART has a TX and an RX pad associated with it. TX is for transmit, RX for receive, and you're going to see those denoted in wiring diagrams or in pin layouts as T2, R2, T1, R1. T2 is UART 2 transmit, R1 is UART 1 receive. So immediately, the UART number that we're working with is designated by that number. And sometimes we'll see that these UARTs are accessed via plugs. In other words, they're sort of mapped by the board designer to a pin inside a plug. And other times we'll see that they are accessed via a solder pad. Here's the solder pad is R1, T1, T2, R2. And if we go down here, we can see T3, UART 4, UART 5, and so forth. The takeaway is that when you've finished building your quadcopter, you should have a mental list or maybe even a physical list that you write down of the UARTs that your flight controller has and what you have attached to that UART. And in fact, if you're starting a new build, it might be a good idea to make this list before you even start building so you can start thinking about where you're going to put all the wires to all the peripherals that you've got. For example, you may go, okay, I'm going to put my receiver here, my video transmitter here, and oh no, I need to put my GPS somewhere, but it doesn't, the flight controller is out of UARTs, and then you got to think about what you do. Better to find those things before you start building than in the middle of a build. So now we're going to go through the Ports tab and talk about the different things that you can put on each UART and how you configure the Ports tab to interface with those things. And the place I like to start is Serial RX. Serial RX refers to your receiver. That's the thing that you bind to your controller, and it receives your stick movements and communicates them to the flight controller. There are different kinds of receivers: FrSky, FlySky, Spektrum, Futaba, Crossfire, Tracer, Ghost, Express LRS. I'm just rattling these off because I wanted to ring a bell with you if you've got one of them. All of those are serial receivers, and you would indicate to the flight controller which UART you put the serial receiver on by enabling the Serial RX toggle for that UART number. So for this setup, I have the receiver on UART 1. It would typically be on RX1, although some receiver types use TX instead, and that would be a topic we're not going to go into in this video. Now, there are a couple limitations here for what you can and can't do in the Ports tab, and the first thing I want to show you is you can only have one thing enabled for each UART at a time. So, for example, UART 4 has MSP enabled, and now I'm going to enable Serial RX. And if I save and reboot, what you'll see is that the Ports tab is going to be completely wiped clean back to defaults. Now, nothing is enabled. It's kind of disappointing that the devs do that. Like, if I create an invalid configuration, could you not just reject it? Could you not just be like, nah, no, and put everything back how it was? Instead, it just completely wipes the whole Ports tab clean. And that's why I told you in video number one to back up your configuration before you start working on this because you could get it back. So you can only have one thing at a time on each UART. You can't do this one thing at a time on each row, on each UART of the Ports tab. There are very few exceptions to this. I want to acknowledge that there are. They do exist, but they're very, very rare, and almost always you'll just wipe your Ports tab if you try to do two things on the same UART. Now, interestingly, if I try and put Serial RX on more than one UART, it does in fact allow me to do that. However, don't get your hopes up. Betaflight only supports one serial receiver at a time. And so in a case like this, if you theoretically did wire up multiple receivers, I'm not actually even sure how you would know which one it would actually listen to. Bottom line is only enable Serial RX on one UART, whichever UART number you hooked your serial receiver to. Next, let's talk about the Configuration MSP column. MSP stands for Multi-Serial Protocol, and it is a protocol that is used to talk to flight controllers going way, way, way back. The key thing you need to know about MSP is that anything that wants to interface with, to read information from the flight controller, about the flight controller, is going to use MSP. Anything that wants to remotely configure the flight controller is probably going to use MSP. So, for example, you'll notice that this USB VCP port, which is not in fact a UART, it is the actual USB interface on the flight controller, and it has MSP enabled on it. And in fact, they won't let you turn it off because in fact I am using MSP right now in the Configurator to talk to the flight controller over USB. And if I were to turn that off, then my whole USB port would stop working, which they used to let you do that, and people get locked out of their flight controllers. It's kind of dumb. I'm glad they stopped that. So why would you enable MSP for anything other than USB? The main way that MSP is used today is if you have DJI or HD0 A...

number two in the series if you are looking for the series as a whole there is a link to the playlist down in the video description and if you stumbled upon this video for some reason get what you need from this video but then i

highly encourage you to go back to video number one and start from scratch and just learn it all in this video we are going to go through the ports tab let's get into it in order to understand the ports tab let's take

an example flight controller like oh i don't know my own jb f7 flight controller and we're going to look at the wiring diagram for this flight controller and there's stuff that you got to hook up to a flight controller

that has to communicate with the flight controller stuff like the dji video transmitter which uses serial communication to send information about battery voltage on-screen display and other such things or like your receiver your receiver sends digital data to the flight controller

that tells it what you're doing with your sticks or your video transmitter your video transmitter yes it sends video signals through the flight controller and that's not a digital serial communication but it also does smart audio which is how the flight controller

can tell the video transmitter what channel it should be on or what output power should be on the point is that there are various peripheral devices that we connect to our flight controller and the flight controller needs an

interface to communicate with those devices and those interfaces are called uarts and you can see a list of the uarts on this flight controller here in the ports tab now if we look on wikipedia we can see that uart stands

for universal asynchronous receiver transmitter and you can go read that wikipedia page if you want to no more in depth but the point is a uart on a flight controller is it's kind of like a usb port it's something that you attach

a peripheral to that the flight controller is going to communicate with so here in the ports tab we see the uarts that this flight controller has and they are numbered one two three four five six they are usually but not always

sequential some flight controllers might have a missing uart it might they might go one two four five six or whatever it that's a decision made by the designer of the flight controller don't be surprised or think anything's wrong if

you see one is missing and for each of these uarts we are going to tell the flight controller what type of peripheral device is attached to that uart and we're going to do that by adjusting these options here now when we set up

the flight controller we're going to connect each peripheral to some uart tx and rx pads on the flight controller so each uart has a tx and an rx pad associated with it tx is for transmit rx for receive and you're going to see

those denoted in wiring diagrams or in pin layouts as t2 r2 t1 r1 t2 is uart2 transmit tr1 is uart 1 receive so immediately the uart number that we're working with is designated by that number and sometimes we'll see that

these uarts are accessed via plugs in other words they're sort of mapped by the board designer to a pin inside a plug and other times we'll see that they are accessed via a solder pad here's the solder pad is r1 t1 t2 r2 and if we go

down here we can see t3 you're at four yard five and so forth the takeaway is that when you've finished building your quadcopter you should have a mental list or maybe even a physical list that you write down of the uarts that your flight

controller has and what you have attached to that uart and in fact if you're starting a new build it might be a good idea to make this list before you even start building so you can start thinking about where

you're going to put all the wires to all the peripherals that you've got for example you may go okay i'm going to put my receiver here my video transmitter here and oh no i need to put my gps

somewhere but it doesn't the flight controller is out of uarts and then you got to think about what you do better to find those things before you start building than in the middle of a build so now we're going to go through the

ports tab and talk about the different things that you can put on each uart and how you configure the ports tab to interface with those things and the place i like to start is serial rx serial rx refers to your receiver that's

the thing that you bind to your controller and it receives your stick movements and communicates them to the flight controller there are different kinds of receivers freesky flysky spectrum futaba crossfire tracer ghost express lrs i'm just rattling these off

because i wanted to ring a bell with you if you've got one of them all of those are serial receivers and you would indicate to the flight controller which uart you put the serial receiver on by enabling the serial rx toggle for

that uart number so for this setup i have the receiver on uart 1. it would typically be on rx1 although some receiver types use tx instead and that would be a topic we're not going to go into in this video now there are a

couple limitations here for what you can and can't do in the ports tab and the first thing i want to show you is you can only have one thing enabled for each uart at a time so for example

uart4 has msp enabled and now i'm going to enable serial rx and if i save and reboot what you'll see is that the ports tab is going to be completely wiped clean back to defaults now nothing is enabled it's kind of

disappointing that the devs do that like if i create an invalid configuration could you not just reject it could you not just be like nah now and put everything back how it was instead it just completely wipes the

whole ports tab clean and that's why i told you in video number one to back up your configuration before you start working on this because you could get it back so you can only have one thing at a

time on each you can't do this one thing at a time on each row on each uart of the ports tab there are a very few exceptions to this i want to acknowledge that there are they do exist

but they're very very rare and almost always you'll just wipe your ports tab if you try to do two things on the same uart now interestingly if i try and put serial rx on more than one uart it does

in fact allow me to do that however don't get your hopes up betaflight only supports one serial receiver at a time and so in a case like this if you theoretically did wire up multiple receivers i'm not actually even sure how

you would know which one it would actually listen to bottom line is only enable serial rx on one uart whichever uart number you hooked your serial receiver to next let's talk about the configuration msp column msp stands for multi-serial protocol and

it is a protocol that is used to talk to flight controllers going way way way back um the the key thing you need to know about msp is that anything that wants to interface with to read information from the flight controller

about the flight controller is going to use msp anything that wants to remotely configure the flight controller is probably going to use msp so for example you'll notice that this usb vcp port which is not in fact a uart

it is the actual usb interface on the flight controller and it has msp enabled on it and in fact they won't let you turn it off because in fact i am using msp right now in the configurator to talk to the flight controller over

usb and if i were to turn that off then my whole usb port would stop working which they used to let you do that and people get locked out of their flight controllers it's kind of dumb i'm glad

they stopped that so why would you enable msp for anything other than usb the main way that msp is used today is if you have dji or hd0 and msp is used by the dji and the hd0 video systems to read information from

the flight controller that they then use to draw the on-screen display these digital video systems have to draw their own on-screen display because the analog circuitry that was traditionally used on the flight controller doesn't work with them so instead of the flight controller

drawing the on-screen display information the hd0 and the dji system read that information from the flight controller over msp and then they use that to draw the on-screen display um that that's pretty much it that's pretty much it that's pretty much

the only time you would enable msp for any other uart other than the usb1 which is on by default so if we look right here we have a dji air unit that is connected to the jbf7 flight controller

and you can see in that plug there is a tx and an rx wire and they're going to t2 and r2 and that is the uart connection that the dji air unit is going to use to read that information

to draw the osd so if we had this flight controller right now we would go in to the ports tab and we would enable msp on uart2 and that would allow that to work the other thing we got to know about is

this pull down here which is the baud rate and that is how fast the flight controller will try to talk to the air unit and the bottom line is that if the baud rate isn't set to the wrong value

then the communication won't occur in almost all cases you're just going to leave the default of 115 200. however there sometimes is documentation for that sometimes you'll see them say to set it to 115 200.

next let's go to the peripherals column and if we just look at what's available here in the pull down we can go through these and discuss them one by one and the first one is black box logging i

told you in part number one that flight controllers have the ability to log data like a like a black box flight recorder on an airplane and it can be useful for troubleshooting or tuning your quadcopter some flight controllers have a built-in

data flash chip that records that data some flight controllers have an sd card slot on board and you put an sd card in them to record that data and then if you don't have one of those on your flight

controller you can actually buy a standalone black box recording module that you wire up to a uart on your flight controller and then you can record black box that way if you were to do that you would take the uart that you

had soldered to and you would choose black box logging and then you would set the baud rate that you were going to use and that baud rate is going to be hopefully in the documentation for the device right here

it says uh baud rate 200 000 or whatever the next two options in the list are vtx tbs smart audio and vtx irc these two protocols smart audio and telemetry are used to communicate between the flight controller and a

video transmitter so if you have an analog video transmitter one of the most basic things you will do with it is tell it that you want it to be on a certain channel and then you put your goggles on

that same channel and then you will be able to see the signal and if you're flying with other people a lot of times you have to move to a certain channel so that you're sort of coordinating your channels

and nobody wants to do that by like pushing a button on their flight on their video transmitter that's annoying instead you can do it using your flight controller you can pop up a menu in your goggles and you can

use your controller sticks to move around and you can change those settings looking here in the manual for the jbf7 flight controller we can see some examples of this here is the iflight success force video transmitter and it

has a wire labeled rx and it goes to a tx pad on the flight controller they've shown it going to t5 one thing to keep in mind is that in general uarts are interchangeable so they're showing it going to t5 but

there's nothing special about t5 you could put it on t4 or t3 or t2 or t1 as long as you set your ports tab up correctly and remember only one thing on each uart at a time here we've got it

going to t5 here we've got a different video transmitter the hv and they have labeled that wire instead of labeling it rx they've labeled it t for telemetry which is confusing but regardless they've got it going to uart

tx and here we've got a tbs video transmitter where they call it data and it goes to t5 so the exact nomenclature that's used by the manufacturer of the video transmitter is going to differ but the bottom line is when you look at a video

transmitter there's going to be a power input there's going to be a video input and there's going to be something that is used for the smart audio or the telemetry by the way smart audio and telemetry they're two different

protocols and in general a given video transmitter will only support one of those two protocols and you just have to look in the documentation for the video transmitter to see whether trip telemetry or smart audio is correct generally

most video transmitters today use smart audio it's more popular it comes from tbs and so all tbs video transmitters will use smart audio telemetry comes from immersion rc so immersion rc uh will use it and i think like a few

others like i think maytech uses it the bottom line is you have to look in the video transmitter's product page or other documentation to see which of those is correct so if we had wired up a video transmitter to uart 5 we would

choose either tbs smart audio or irc whichever was correct for our video transmitter here in the peripherals column and we would save and reboot and that's how we would set that up by the way baud rate is always set to

auto for these two options next on the list is run cam camera this is a pretty obscure application if you do have a camera that's compatible with this it's pretty nice run cam cameras specifically support this so if

you have a cadx or a foxier camera no good and this is just for analog run cam cameras as well as the runcam split style cameras like the runcam hybrid those cameras will often have a tx and an rx line that

can be used to remote control the camera on analog cameras you can use your joystick to configure the camera options like brightness contrast and so forth instead of plugging a joystick into the camera uh for the run cam split and so forth

you can actually set up switches to start and stop recording which some people like i've got a video more about how to set that up but the takeaway is that if you look at the back of your camera and you see a tx and an rx wire

you can wire that up to a uart on your flight controller and then you can remote control the camera and configure it and so forth by the way i don't think i've mentioned this before but almost always when working with

uarts tx goes to rx and rx goes to tx that's not normally how you wire things up normally 5 volts goes to 5 volts and ground goes to ground and so forth but when working with uarts tx on one device

goes to rx on the other rx on one device goes to tx on the other the last two options here are even more obscure and you will almost never run into them this lidar thing i've never seen it used i

guess there's a lidar device out there that can talk to betaflight i'd be surprised if it was even still supported i don't think you're going to run into this and the other is osd freesky protocol and there are a very very few

flight controllers like a few of the newbie drone tiny whoop flight controllers use this it is a way of communicating osd that didn't seem to take off but very rarely you will see a flight controller come from the manufacturer with osd freesky

protocol set and the takeaway for you is that if you change that your osd your on-screen display and your goggles won't work anymore so that's all the peripherals next we're going to talk about the sensor input and the telemetry

column but before we do that if you're learning a lot and you really value this content can i ask you to go down and hit the like button it really helps out a lot and i sure do appreciate it next

let's go to the sensor input column and you'll see there are only two options here the first one is gps and that is used if you have wired a gps unit to your flight controller for obvious reasons if you've done that one takeaway is that

you should usually set auto as the baud rate if you know that your gps unit only supports a certain baud rate then you can set that baud rate but if you don't know setting it to auto and then when we

get to the configuration tab or maybe the gps tab i'll show you another setting for setting up gps but in general you just enable this set it to auto and then complete the configuration in another tab and we're going to use

the esc peripheral when we look at our esc's pin out diagram let's see if i can find this there it is so i just picked this esc at random and here is the pin out diagram for the plug and you can see

that it has a telemetry pin if we look at this other esc that i picked at random you can see the pin out is labeled c t and that t is going to stand for telemetry and here's another one just

for comparison and if we look we can see tx now they've labeled it tx instead of t the bottom line is that if your esc has a telemetry output it will be connected to a certain uart on the flight

controller and here in betaflight configurator you would set esc as your sensor input for that uart number if we jump back to the manual for the jbf7 flight controller i want you to see that here is the plug for the esc

and in the plug for the esc is r4 so that is where the telemetry input to the flight controller is going to be and as the name suggests r4 it is uart number four so if we were using you can't just

you're generally not going to just randomly choose a uart number to connect your esc to there will be a plug built into the flight controller and it'll have a uart number in there specifically intended for you to use it you could

solder it to another uart if you wanted to like if you broke the plug but in general you wouldn't do that now the telemetry output column and it turns out that a lot of people aren't going to need to use this the reason for that is

a little bit lost in history but modern protocols like immersion rc ghost tracer crossfire and express lrs telemetry is just implied you don't need to enable telemetry or configure telemetry with them it's just implied that they will have telemetry what even

is telemetry i kind of skipped that telemetry is the ability of the flight controller to send data back to the controller that you're holding in your hands some people confuse telemetry with osd data on-screen display which is information you see in the goggles but

in general the osd data is drawn on there by the flight controller or the video transmitter and isn't really sent back to the controller it's just displayed in the video feed there are various reasons why you might want to send telemetry back to your

controller for example i just like to see on my controller screen before i plug in before i put my goggles on that my battery voltage my battery is charged up and my my signal strength for my controller is good and then i put my

goggles down and i go fly but there are other things you can do with telemetry that we're not going to get into this video telemetry is not mandatory but it is a nice to have so it's nice that

protocols like crossfire tracer express lrs immersion rc ghost all do it automatically but some older protocols it wasn't a given that the flight controller would send telemetry and in those cases you would need to manually configure the type of telemetry that the

flight controller is going to send now frankly i don't want to dive into this too much because most of this is antiquated and most people aren't going to need to do this but i would like to focus on a couple of cases that you're

more likely to run into today and one of them is freesky smart port telemetry so if you have a receiver like a freesky rxsr a freesky xm plus or one of the newer freesky archer receivers they can do smart port telemetry for example

here's the manual for the archer m plus receiver from freesky and we can see it's got an s port or smart port pin here that would be wired to a uart tx it turns out that a smart port goes to tx

you just have to memorize these things unfortunately s bus goes to rx smart port goes to tx smart audio goes to tx eventually you will learn them if you look at enough wiring diagrams so that smart port wire

from the receiver would be connected to perhaps t2 here on the flight controller and then here in the ports tab for uart2 well we would need to disable msp but okay you would you would select smart port telemetry as the telemetry output

and then that would work and frankly i think that's where i'm going to leave the telemetry screen because almost all of these other kinds of telemetry that are supported are pretty obscure and i suspect that not a lot of people are

going to be using them today and in fact that's going to bring us to the end of the ports tab now you know pretty much everything you need to know to set up the ports tab to recap number

one make a list of the uarts on your flight controller number two make a list of what peripheral is on each uart and then number three go to the ports tab and configure the settings as i showed you in this video next up the

configuration tab no the receiver tab i'm going to go out of order and i'm going to go to the receiver tab next and if you want to know why you will have to click that video and see or if you're looking to go somewhere

else in this video series there's a link to the entire playlist down in the video description i'll see you there