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TX16S Beginner Guide to Inputs and Mixes Made EASY

https://youtu.be/C1euH2C3Gxg

TX16s Inputs and Mixes can be confusing. Here, I’m gonna explain it very simply, clearly and concisely for you.

Hey everybody. Steve here. Welcome to the second video in my radio master TX 16 S series. In the first video, we kick things off by adding a new model and binding it to a receiver. All right. So for the purposes of this video series, we’re going to be using the fr sky D eight protocol. We’ve got it bound to a quad copter and the flight control software we’re going to be using is beta flight. So even if you’re using a different protocol, I still feel like you’ll get some good use out of this video series because the primary focus here is going to be learning how to use open TX, which is the firmware that runs on the TX 16 S by the end of this video series, we’re going to take a deep dive into most of the menus in open TX and using the example that we’re going to use.

I feel that by the end of the series, you’re going to have a pretty darn good idea on how to use the vast majority of the functions of this radio. So without further ado, let’s get started with video two, where we add functionality to the model that we’ve already added to the radio. All right. So you may recall from the first video that we added a model and we bounded to our radio, but the reality is, is that we really didn’t do much of anything at all, because we just followed a wizard and the wizard actually did all the work. Let’s start off by taking a look at what the wizard did. And in order to do that, remember this silver button here is model. This one here is system. So what we’re going to want to do is we’re going to want to get in to the model.

So I’m going to long press it. Now, when you long press it across the top here, you’ve got all the pages that are involved in the model signup, which is models, model set up. We’ve got flight modes, inputs, mixes, outputs, curves, global variables, logical switches, special functions, cousins, grips, and telemetry. We will eventually tackle these screens one by one in this video series. But for right now, things are going to be the most interesting to you are going to be inputs, mixes, and outputs. Okay. All right. So inputs are just that they’re inputs. What does that mean? Well, we, as users need a way to interact with the radio and the way that we interact with this radio is either with stick movements, okay. Or switch flips. Okay. That is the way that we interact with this radio. We tell the radio what we want based on either a stick or a switch.

So let’s take a look at the inputs. Okay. So the wizard set this up for us and what the wizards set up was the minimum requirements that we need to fly, which is an aileron and elevator, a throttle, and a, and you know, those as essentially stick movements. Okay. Throttle and rudder elevator. And aileron. So now let’s take a closer look at what we’ve got here. And if you look at these pictures, these are all sticks. They’re actually sticks. And what the radio has done is it has defined the aileron stick, the elevator, stick, the throttle stick, and the rudder stick. And let’s take a closer look at what that looks like.

Okay. So the source in this particular case is the aileron stick. They layer on stick is hardwired into the radio. The other on stick will always be the aileron stick. Okay. And all we’ve done here is give it a name that we can recognize as humans. And the input name is Taylor on the rest of this stuff. You don’t need to worry about quite yet. But if we back out of this menu, I will address the zero through eight that you’re seeing here, because those are the nine flight modes. And as multirotor pilots, we’re not doing anything with flight nuts. Okay. That’s what inputs do and puts, define the switches in the sticks that we’re using so that we can interact with the radio and control it to have some sort of predictable outcome. Okay. So a lot of people get hung up on the mixes screen because it looks so similar to the input screen, but they are very different.

The mixes screen is a way to map the input sources to specific channels so that the information can be passed from the radio to the receiver on the quad. We know that our receivers have a certain number of channels on them. And this screen is where we are defining those channels. And for our first four channels, which are our mandatory flight requirements, uh, the set ups rather simple. All right. So we’re back at the input screen. And if inputs and mixes are still a little bit confusing to you, don’t worry about it. It’ll take a little time for it to, uh, kind of submit into your brain. But I think that as we add some examples that will help tremendously in getting you to understand how these things work. But here’s what we need to know so far. Uh, aileron elevator throttle and rudder. Those are all stick movements and that’s basically all of our stick movements. Okay. So at this point, we’re going to be adding inputs, but we’re going to be adding input with what we have left, which are switches. All right. So let’s do a two position switch. And what we’re going to add right now is an input that will either arm or disarm the quad. So let’s go ahead do that now. So we’re on five and I am going to long press to get to this screen right here. And now I’m going to quick, quick press, and I’m going to call this arm.

We are also going to work on a, um, methodology. That’s going to make all of this data entry much, much easier. All right. So arm always nice to give ourselves some clarification as a line item. All right. It’s decision time. We need to pick, what do we want our arm to be? Well, arm only has two positions, arm and disarm, which is basically this stick right here. And this stick right here. And if you notice this stick right here, doesn’t hold in a position. It’s just kind of a, I don’t, I don’t know what to call it. Um, but it’s, it’s it snaps back into place. We’re going to, we’re going to actually use this one for our buzzer later, but this switch right here is a nice two position switch. Okay. So we’re going to use this switch right here as our arm switch. And that guy is S F either two position switch. All right. And that’s going to be, there’s going to be in the disarmed position and that will be in the arm position. You can make it backwards if you want. It doesn’t matter. Um, we’ll take care of that in beta flight, but Assef is going to be our go-to for our arm switch.

All right. So the field has the focus right now, but it’s not selected. Now it’s selected and check this out. If I flip the switch, I don’t even have to scroll through the menu because if I flip the switch, it’ll suck it for me. And there it is SF. Okay. And now I want to go ahead and do that. Hit enter, and I am done. I have effectively told the radio that I want to use SF, and I’m going to call it something called arm. Now the arm switch is not hardwired into the radio, like the, um, sticks were. So we’re going to have to further define this. Okay. So let’s go back and look, there it is R S F switch. Okay. So we have now created an input to where our fingertips can flip a switch and talk to the radio, but what do we need now?

We need the radio to talk to our receiver, which is on our quad. And in order to get those guys to get talking, all right, we need to go to mixes. So let’s add a mix and we’re going to make that channel five. Okay. So the channel that we select is arbitrary. We can make it whatever channel we want, just going to take the next one in sequence. And that kind of makes sense to me. So channel five, I’m going to long press, and I’m going to give it a name. Then I can understand I’m going to call this armed. Okay. So I can scroll down. So now I’m saying that VIX, this mix is going to be armed and it’s going to be using the source, which is the arm. Okay. Which we’ve defined as S E. Now, if we come down here, we can further define this. We’re going to come down here and I’m going to select switches. And if I throw the switch SF, it now says SF in the down position is armed. That would make armed in the SF up position. But let’s go ahead and make SF in the down position. Armed. Now, stay with me here for a second. Alright, now I’m done. I’m going to go back a screen.

Alright. And check this out because I want two options for my arm switch. I need to define another one. And overall, it’s going to be rather similar. So if I hold down this button right here, I can copy it. And where am I going to put it? I’m going to put it right here. Okay. Meaning channel five. Meaning I want it also on channel five. Okay. So now I’ve got the exact same thing. So I need to go in here by long clicking and editing. Okay. And I’m going to change the name and this one is going to be disabled disarm, but I have to tell it, when is it disarmed? Well, it is disarmed when the S F switch is in the other position. So I’m going to select this. And all I need to do is throw the switch like that. And now it has SF.

And now it has SF in the up position. I select it. And now I want to go back and there it is, channel five is now defined, okay. As my arm switch, because that’s where we defined it on the previous screen. Right? So here, we’ve done two things. We have told the radio, what channel we want to kick arm out as, and we have further defined the mix in terms of the mix of the switch. If SF is in the down position, then we’re armed. If SF is in the up position, then we’re disarmed. And that is because we selected the SF switch and our inputs. This is us communicating with the radio, and this is the radio communicating with the receiver on the quad. Now we have to further define this in beta flight, and we’ll get to that step. But for now, let’s add one more. Let’s go back to inputs and let’s do a flight mode. So in order to do a flight mode, we’re going to come down to six long press.

Okay? So flight mode, flight mode is going to be a matter of preference. You can basically select whatever switch you want to select. Uh, personally, I’m used to flight mode being right here on SG. So that’s where I’m going to put flight mode. And essentially beta flight has three flight modes. Uh, there’s going to be, uh, the easiest, which is angle then horizon then acro. Okay. All right. So I’m going to go to the next field here. And I, all I have to do is flip the switch. So there’s SG. So SG is now selected, and I can back out of this. Once I make that selection, I can get out and check it out. And flight mode is now set up as an input on S G. So the next thing I want to do is I want to go to my mixes and I want to add the three mixes that I’m going to need for my SG switch, which basically means I’m going to need, I’m going to need one for angle, one for horizon and one for acro.

So I’m going to come down to six and select it. And now this mix name, this is the first one. This is the one that I want to name angle mode, and I’m gonna come down to switch. I’m gonna click switch. And now this is once again, personal preference. I prefer for angle mode to be in the up position. And I don’t have to search for it through the menu. I can just flip the switch. Okay. So my angle mode is going to be as G in the up position, get off the field back out one. And there I am. So now that I have that, I can just copy that twice and select it, copy it. And now I have to select where I want to put it. So I’m going to insert after like cell, and now this one is going to be for horizon mode and for horizon mode, I want the switch in the middle position. So there’s my SG in the middle position, select it

And back out.

All right. So we’ve got angle, we’ve got horizon, and now it’s time for ACRA. So I’m just going to copy it again. I got to remember to insert it answered after, and this is going to be aircraft and I switched selection. That’s going to be one. The switches forward S G is forward or down, I guess down is a better way to put it, select it, come back twice. All right. So check it out. We have created three mixes for our flight modes. So now real quick, I’m going to do one more for the buzzer, and I’ll just speed up the film as I go through it. Cause I think you get the idea.

All right. So to recap, what I just spent through real quick, I just made another switch. The S H switch for the buzzer. That’s the one with the toggle. And if I got to mixes come down, I only included one because this is the unique, uh, switch on the radio. That is a toggle. So sort of the default is when the switches in the apposition. So I only need a one for the down position. So that’s that? Okay. So at this point, I hope you have a better idea of inputs and mixes, and we’re going to move on to outputs. Oh, Oh, outputs. Um, the good news on outputs is that we don’t have to worry about that right now. We’re really not going to be doing anything with outputs as of yet. So we’re going to put that off, uh, until another video. All right.

So if it hasn’t jelled yet, and you’re still confused, you’re like, what, what I, I th something’s missing here then you’re absolute, right. Something is missing here. We need to further define all this stuff in beta flight, and that’s what we’re going to do now. All right. So here we are in beta flight on our receiver tab and our quad is plugged into a battery. And you’ll notice that when I move throttle, throttle works good and our rudder works good, but it’s our rudder. And here we go with our pitch working good. That’s our elevator and our roll, which is our aileron, everything’s working good. Now, if you remember the wizard set up the first four channels for us, that’s channels one, two, three, and four. What you’re looking at right now is an F R sky D eight receiver. So we only have eight channels on this thing.

It’s a little bit older, but it’ll be fine for doing the things that we need to do. Now, if you remember, we added a channel five, a channel six, and a channel seven on the radio. So let’s go put that to the test, channel five, we added as an arm switch, and we put it back here on this two position switch. So let’s see if five comes in as ox one. And it does it’s either on or off, right? Uh, the second one that we added was our three position switch for our flight modes. And let’s see if that pops up on ox two. And there it is. And as you can see, it moves about 33% of the way each time, because it is a three position switch. Okay. Now, third thing we added was a buzzer back here to position switch. And it was either on or off.

So because we predefined that stuff in the radio, it is showing up here. I can move any of the rest of these switches. And Oxford is not going to do anything until we predefine it in the radio. If I were to try to summarize everything and bottom line at, for you on the input screen, that is the communication between your fingers and the radio on the mixing screen. That is the communication between the radio mapping it in a channels for your receiver. And this in beta flight is essentially the signals going from your receiver to the flight controller so that the flight controller knows what to do. So it’s basically a handshake. And then another handshake mixes map the channels, and then here in beta flight or further defining it. So that beta flight knows what to do with it. So let’s take a closer look at it, the next step.

All right, now it’s time to take a deeper dive into beta flight. One more place to define this stuff, and that’s going to be in modes. We need to set up the modes. So let’s go ahead and do that. Now, first thing that we want to do is our arm switch. So we’re going to add a range here. So watch what happens when I flip the SF switch, which is the two position switch that we selected for arm. See the little orange cursor, it shoots across the screen. Okay. So what we want to do is we want to define armed as when this guy is over here in this range and there it is. Okay. So now the other thing is armed. Now it is disarmed and we can go ahead and hit save. Now that we’ve hit safe, look, it’s warning us that we’re in the armed position.

Okay. So that one was pretty simple. The next one that we did was let’s go ahead and add a range for angle. And remember this, one’s going to be ox two. That’s going to be our angle. Let’s see how far it travels to get to horizon. Okay. So horizon is right smack dab in the middle. So let’s go ahead and add, arrange for horizon. And there it is. And because acro is the default flight mode in beta flight, we don’t have to actually add one. All right. So check it out. Angle is highlighted because I’m an angle mode. I’m going to throw the switch to the center. I am now in horizon mode, and now I’m going to switch it to acro. So now neither one of those are highlighted because the default mode is ECRO mode and we don’t need to set one up for acro.

All right. So we did one more switch. We did a beeper. So I’m going to go ahead and add a for the beeper and which one was that? That was ox three. I believe. I mean, let me test it. Yep. Ox three. All right. So now we want this beeper to be on when we’re pulling the stick towards us. So there’s pulling the stick towards us when I let go it’s off when I’m pushing or when I’m pulling on it or pulling towards me, it’s on and I’ve got to hit save. And now when I do this beeper lights up, and as you can tell, in terms of the mappings, there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of things that we can do here. We’re just doing the basics for right now. And then one thing that I like to do from a personal standpoint is hide the unused ones.

So we have gone from inputs to mixes into beta flight, where we further defined everything. And now we have taken the information all the way from our fingertips, all the way to the flight controller on the quad. The code on the flight controller is going to basically communicate with ESCs, which are the electronic speed controllers. They are going to tell the motors how fast to spin and the quad is going to fly. All right, we have covered a ton of ground in this video. If it’s still a little cloudy in your head, go back and watch this video. One more time. I guarantee with the information that you’re armed with at this point, when you go through it again and see it again, you’re going to have some aha moments, and I think it will click for you. Now, we are in a situation where we can flip a switch and be in a flight mode, but what if we get bored with angle mode and we’re in horizon mode and things get a little squirrely up there, and we want to flip it back to angle mode and we accidentally pull it towards us and put us in ACRA mode.

Well, things are going to get a lot worse for us because Akron mode is much harder to fly in than either of the other two. Okay. So what we’re going to do in the next video is we’re going to add audio cues so that when we change or flip our switch, see, for example, flip this switch, it’ll say horizon mode. And we flip it again. It’ll say angle mode. We flip it again. It says horizon. We flip it again. It says, acro, we can also do our arms switch to where we flip it and it’s armed. It will say armed. And when we, when we disarm, it’ll say disarm, we can do the same thing with the buzzer. Okay, I’m going to go ahead and tell you right now that audio cues are the single best thing that you could possibly do to make sure that you don’t have an unnecessary crash.

It is so reassuring to be able to flip a switch and know that you flip the switch correctly and knowing what mode you’re in or whether you’re armed or disarmed. It’s just, it’s just huge. So do me a favor comment, like subscribe, hit the little bell so that you get notifications of future videos when they come out. Because after I do the audio cue video, uh, we’re going to take this a lot further using logical switches and special. And essentially what I’m going to do is I’m going to set this thing up to where I can tune my P IDs in flight, using three switches without ever having to look down from the radio. And the way I’m going to do that is through special functions, logical switches. So we’re going to be setting up some more inputs. We’re going to be setting up some more mixes, and we are going to get deep into the logical switches menu. And we’re going to get deep into the special functions menu. I’m Steve. I hope you enjoyed the video. I’ll be making the next one here in the next day or so. And I look forward to seeing you in the next video.

TX16S Beginner Guide How To Add New Model and Bind Receiver

https://youtu.be/oDe9VJk37ws

A real TX16s beginners guide for beginners! Need to learn how to Create a Model and Bind it on your Radiomaster TX16s? Well, lets go!

Hey everybody. I’m Steve and I am so excited to have the opportunity to bring this video series to you. Uh, we are going to take a look at the new radio master T X 16 S and we are going to take it through its paces. Uh, in this video series, we’re going to start from zero and we’re going to learn basics like adding a new model and binding the radio to a receiver. And then we’re going to add some functionality such as adding a arm switch and flight modes and a buzzer. And then we’re going to take it up a notch even more. And we’re going to add voice cues. So for example, you know what flight mode you’re in without having to look down at the radio from there, we are going to take a deep dive into the menus, and we’re going to use a practical example.

That’ll be a huge benefit to you. In addition to the learning experience, by the end of the series, I’m going to incorporate functionality into the radio that will allow us to tune our nine P IDs in flight while using only three switches on the radio and have audio cues that we never ever have to look down from our quads. Now there’s an existing way to do this using the beta flight LUA scripts, but when I’ve done it that way in the past, I still feel like I spend a substantial time looking down at my radio, uh, making my way through the menus, as opposed to not ever having to look down from the radio with this three switch methodology, we are going to actually combine it with the beta flight LUA scripts so that you can not only tune your P IDs in flight without ever having to look down. But then when you have an opportunity to look down, you can use the beta flight LUA scripts to see exactly where you’re at and to save your changes. It was kind of the best of both worlds. And at the end of it all, we will have taken such a deep dive into the menus. You have a crystal clear understanding of inputs, mixes, outputs, special functions, logical switches, and probably 90% of what the radio will do. So stick around. So let’s take a quick look at the radio and see some of this functionality in use.

All right. So acknowledging the fact that this video is for beginners. I still think it’s very important for beginners to have a good understanding as to how powerful the radio is that they’re holding in their hands right now and how this radio can actually save you from a crash with the voice cues that you can incorporate in your radio. Uh, knowing what flight mode you’re in is incredibly important, because say, for example, you’re flying along and, and then someday you, uh, get to the point where you’re ready to move up to, and you’re flying around and horizon mode and things get a little bit squirrely and you want to throw your switch back into anger mode and you throw the switch the wrong way, and you end up in, but you didn’t the voice QC. You have no idea that you’re in Acro mode and things get tremendously worse.

And before you know it, your quad is in a million pieces. So if you’re flying in and you want me to be in, it’s good to know that you’re an angle mode, right? Here’s another important one to know whether you’re right or okay, so that one’s important. I’ve taken a giant step further by incorporating these three switches, uh, into PID control so that I can tune my pits in flight. And I know, say for example, I want to tune my role proportional, proportional, or my role integral, or my role drove it. Well, my picture of it, or my Audra of it, you know, it doesn’t matter. I mean, these, these are three position switches and there are nine pits to 10. So, uh, the combination of these two gives me all nine and then I use this third switch, uh, to make my incremental changes. And that is the case study that we’re going to use throughout this entire series so that you can get deep into the menus of this radio. And by the end of it all, you’re going to understand inputs, mixes, outputs, um, logical switches, special functions. So stick around, it’s going to get really, really great, but having said all that, let’s get back to basics.

All right, all that other stuff in due time. But what we’ve got to do is we’ve got to dial it back to zero and start from the very beginning. And the very beginning, first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to add a model to our radio. So I just kind of want to call your attention to this scroll wheel right here. Not only is it a scroll wheel, but it’s a button. I can press it. But in this case, I’m going to need to long press it to bring up the model Slack. Now, if you see if I scroll through, I can scroll through by turning the wheel. Okay. But what I would do is highlight model, select and get to this. And now I want a new model. We’re going to start fresh. So I’m going to long hold again, and I get an opportunity to create a model. So let’s go ahead and do that. Now this is kind of goofy because you can’t see it, right? Yeah.

Now I can barely see it. But, um, one of these is highlighted and the other one is not currently, the plane is highlighted. It’s just white on a yellow background. You’ll be able to see it a lot better on your own radio. But you know, for the purpose of the video, you can’t really see that plane is highlighted. So it’s, it’s set up for plane. There’s no multirotor yet, but I’m just going to go ahead and select plane and it is white print on yellow background. If I turn it this much white print on yellow background, it says, does your model have a motor? We, our model does have a motor. And what channel is it on? Well, we were running beta flight. So AETR that’s throttle. It is on channel three. So we’re good to go. So I’m just going to go ahead and page your head here.

And it says number of ailerons, number of ailerons on your model. And we only have one, so I’ve got to select it, get a blink in, and then I’m going to say, I’m just going to say one. Now aileron remember, you’re going to commit to memory AETR which is aileron elevator throttle, Rutter. Uh, our aileron is channel one because it’s on the AETR. Aileron is channel one. So it’s paid through and do we have flaps? No, we do not have flaps moving on and pick the tail configure of your model. Well, it’s thinking it’s an airplane, but, uh, essentially what we’re going to want is we’re going to want an elevator and we’re going to want a Rudder. And our elevator a E is on channel two and T our, our runner is on channel four.

So this is actually all set up pretty darn good. Pretty good. All right. Um, so a motor is three that’s. Our T either on is one, a E T R. That is set up the way it needs to be. I can exit out of here. Once it finishes up with the wizard there, you can see that it’s added model 12. We’ve got a little check by model 12, and we’re good to go. So we can hit the return button to go back to the main menu. And then there’s our model 12. So one thing I want you to do is this big silver button here, a big silver button here. This is model. This is system. I want you to think of these as folders in like windows. For example, if you click on the folder, you’re going to be presented with a whole bunch of more folders, and you can just dig deeper and deeper and deeper.

All right, we’re going to mess with the model right now. So we are going to long click the model button, and we are now in a model setup. And if you remember, I was talking about once you click it, you got a whole bunch of options. These are the screams that throughout the course of this video series, we’re going to learn just about everything there is to know. All right? So let’s get back to model set up. And as you can see the it’s it’s pre-made as it’s pre-setup as model 12, we’ve got our scroll wheel here. Model 12 is fully highlighted, which means that that is the field that has the focus. And if we click on it, now we have the opportunity to start modifying the field. So I don’t want to call it model 12. I’m going to call it quad one. So I’m going to use the scroll wheel and I’m going to go to cue. And then once I find my cue, I’m going to click it to go to the next one and it’s on. Oh, and I want to go to you.

So there’s you. Now, if you want capital letters, you just hold it down and it’ll pull up a capital letter. There’s a D I want an a, so a I’m gonna hold it down. And then there’s an E I want a D I’m gonna hold the down. And then here, I want a space. So I don’t remember where the space is, but I’ll find it. There it is so space. There’s the, I want to keep my one. So I’m just going to go ahead and click the two. I don’t want the two. Um, all right. So moving right along, you’ve got to click again. And you just got to kind of be careful here because you’ll, you’ll find yourself in a little loop if you, if you go too far, but at some point the whole thing’s gonna be highlighted again.

And there it is. All right. So now the next thing we want to do is with quad one, highlighted, I can scroll the wheel to get to the next field. Now, the field is select. Now the field has the focus, but it’s not selected. So let’s go ahead and click on it. So that it’s selected. And here we’re presented with a whole bunch of preloaded images that came on our SD card, but I have added my own. And that’s another thing I’m going to cover. It’s nothing special, but it’s just a, it’s just a silly picture of one of my own quads flying in the air. And I’m going to pick quad F S and then the rest of these items here, you can set timers, say, for example, your battery last 10 minutes, and you want to set a timer for eight. So, you know, when, um, you know, come back, I’m not going to do anything with timers right now, but I am going to scroll down because, uh, in order to bind our craft, that is also on this menu, very, very important field.

You’re gonna want to come down to internal RF mode. Okay. All right. Unless you’re using a module in the back of your radio, something like crossfire or something like that, uh, you’re going to use the internal chances are, if you’re a beginner, you’re going to be using the internal, uh, if you’re using crossfire or something that requires that module, then you’re going to be using the external. But for now, let’s do internal. So it is selected off right now. I’m going to click it and I’m going to slide the wheel over one, to get multi M I’m going to select multi by clicking. And then I’m going to move over one more. And it’s already on fly sky, but I don’t want fly sky. I need fr sky, not that fr sky, that fr sky with fr sky selected, I’m gonna click on it. All right.

So the first receiver that I have here is a, you can barely see it. It’s in here. It’s a, uh, fr sky [inaudible], which happens to be a D eight protocol. So I’m going to come over here with fr sky selected. I’m going to move over to the D 16 and I’m going to select the eight. Like, so now I am going to come down a little bit more. You see where it says module update recommended. That is something that we’re going to do in an upcoming video. It’s not something that we need to worry about right this minute. All right. So I am going to say that this is receiver number one, and I’m going to go to bind. And in order to bind, I am going to need something to press the fail, safe button on the receiver, and I’m going to need to be ready with a battery. Alright. And it’s pretty simple. You just hit bind, make sure you come over here and get the fail, safe button and add power.

And you can see that the, the green and the red light are, are both on with one of them blinking the red one’s blinking the green one’s solid. So I jumped back off the power. And then when I re power it back up, You can see that

At the receiver is now green. You’re her heard? You heard her say telemetry recovered between the green light and, uh, her saying telemetry recovered. Uh, we know that we have successfully bound to this quad binding to an fr sky D 16, uh, is the same, pretty much exact procedure. You just make sure you select D 16 there. All right. So that’s going to finish things up here for this video, please, like comment and subscribe. Don’t get to hit the little bell so that you get notifications of future videos when they come out. Because this is just one of many, many videos that we are going to take an in-depth look at this radio, as mentioned before, we’re going all the way with this thing. All right. So in the next video, we’re going to do something very, very important. We’re going to add the three beta flight flight modes, and we’re going to add an arm switch. So the video two exercise is going to give us some experience with, uh, the inputs channel and some experience with the mixes channel. And then we’re just going to keep going and going and going. And by the end of this video series, you’re going to have so much knowledge about this radio. You are not going to know what to do with yourself, but you got to subscribe. You’ve got to stick around and I will see you in the next video.

Beginner Guide To Drones

https://youtu.be/-j4Xtp-2FPo

The most comprehensive drone guide on the Internet. Which drone is really the right drone for you? How do you decide with 1000’s of options out there. Buy or build, RTF or ARTF or BNF? What does all that even mean?

Hey everybody. Steve here. Welcome to the video. I’m glad that you found this one because I’m going to try to put together one of the most comprehensive, how to buy a drone videos on all of YouTube. Uh, I have been buying, building flying, crashing, and rebuilding quads since 2012. So I got a pretty good handle on things. I have flown everything from teeny weeny, little itty-bitty micro quads, all the way up to a huge, I think it’s 1100 millimeter wingspan octacopter, uh, that I used in a movie a few years ago. Okay. So the first thing that I want to acknowledge is the fact that I completely understand how intimidating and daunting it is to try to start getting into this hobby. There are so many options to choose from. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to break it down for you.

I’m actually going to draw a line right down the middle. 50% of the drones are going to appeal to a certain percentage of the audience. And the other 50% of the drones are going to appeal to a different audience. All we need to do is determine where you fall and we’ve already narrowed the type of drone that you’re going to buy down into half the drone world can be cut in half as far as I’m concerned. So take a listen and do a self evaluation and see where you fall on the right. We have what I’m going to label as a consumer drone. And on the left, we are going to have what I label as a hobbyist drone. Let’s take a look at the consumer drone first.

Now this is a DJI drone. Um, it is in the middle of the DGI line of drones. It’s got a very nice camera with a very nice gimbal. This camera floats on a three axis gimbal, which basically gives you silky smooth video. But forget that for right now, what’s important here is that you can go to best buy or Amazon or wherever, and you can buy this drone. And within two hours of getting home with it, you can be up flying. And that two hours is solely based on how long it takes you to charge the batteries. This thing has got GPS. These are collision avoidance sensors on the front, on the bottom, on the back. And that’s not as important as the fact that this thing will lock on with. I don’t know, I’ve seen as many as 15, 16 satellites, maybe even more so once it gets a satellite lock, the GPS will allow you to basically take your hands off the control.

And this thing will just sit in the air. Even in 20 mile an hour, wind gusts. This thing will just sit and float in the air. It won’t do anything. The bottom line is that this is easy to fly. You could buy this and be flying it inside of a couple of hours. Now you’re going to need practice. I don’t recommend you do any kind of crazy aerial acrobatics or anything like that. But if you just want to buy something and fly something, a consumer drone is the way to go, but it does happen. [inaudible] all right. So on the other side of the line is this baby right here. This is what ongoing too late as a hobbyist drone. It did not come like this. And for those of you who were in the know, I know this is an old drum. Uh, my newest one is crashed and in lots of pieces and unavailable for this video.

So I just pulled an old one. But anyway, yeah, this thing did not look like this. When I first got it. As a matter of fact, the propellers, the motors, these are called speed controllers, or ESCs in everything that you see here came in its own little box. And this thing was built from scratch. If you were a beginner, you are not going to be able to get one of these, bring it home and be flying in two hours. Uh, the learning curve on one of these is dramatically steeper than it is on a consumer drone. Uh, this is intended for a completely different audience. This thing is geared for somebody who wants to make a commitment and get into a hobby. Somebody who wants to put in the time to learn how to do this. And I’m going to tell you right now that this hobby requires a tremendous number of skill sets.

You’ve got to be able to build. So for example, you’ve got to learn how to solder. You’ve got to be fairly decent with software because there is a significant amount of configuring that this thing will need to be able to fly correctly. And then you’ve got to learn how to fly and flying a drone without GPS is significantly more difficult than say, flying a consumer drone. You got to ask yourself, do I want a hobby or do I just want to fly? Okay. So now that formal introductions have been made, let’s start dissecting these things down a little bit more starting with this guy right here. All right. So taking a closer look at the people who fell on the 50% line of this drone, I’m going to further break down this group into three groups. Number one, people who buy this thing just to fly.

They just want to have fun. Maybe they’re buying it for a kid or whatever, and they just want to experience the exhilaration of the fun of flying. Okay. That’s number one. Uh, number two are either photographer slash videographers or aspiring photographers slash videographers who want to get absolutely killer aerial photography and videography out of this camera, which is sitting, it’s basically floating on something called a gimbal. It’s a three axis gimbal. And what that means is is if this thing shakes, the gimbal is going to keep the camera perfectly still. So you get those super sexy silky shots that you probably see everywhere on the internet. So photographer slash videographers want to take advantage of the great camera and the super unbelievable range that this thing has, which we’ll talk about later, because I don’t want to get into specs right now. The third group is going to be the combination of those two people who want to take unbelievable footage and people who want to use it just to have fun.

Here’s what I see as a drawback for this drone. But I think that if you’re buying this thing just to fly and the videography photography thing is not for you, if you’re part of that third, that’s just buying this thing for fun. I think it is safe to say, okay, if, if you fly it on a regular basis, I personally think you’re going to get bored. Um, that is what I see as the drawback on this one right here. I will always use this one for taking amazing footage. And if I’m going to the beach or the mountains or whatever, and I want amazing footage, I’m taking this one, this one is much more of a steady work horse by way of comparison. This thing right here is an endless sea of challenges. Just when you think you’ve got it down, there are new challenges.

There are new things to learn. This thing is hands down, probably one of the most challenging hobbies I’ve ever tried to take on in my entire life, uh, as if building’s not hard enough and configuring is not hard enough, and flying’s not hard enough. It’s challenging. So, as I mentioned, I’ve been flying for many, many years and I was flying what we call line of sight, which means that you can see the drone up in the air. You’re actually watching it with your eyes up in the air. And it wasn’t until fairly recently that I got into this thing called FPV, which is called a first person view, which means there’s a little camera on the drone. And there’s a little transmitter on the drone that transmits the camera signal back to me. And I’m wearing these goggles right here. And essentially when I’m looking in the goggles, I’m actually seeing what this camera is seeing.

So if this thing is 30 feet up in the air flying at 25 miles per hour, um, I’m seeing it like I’m sitting right here on the drone first person view. Um, wow. What an exhilarating, unbelievable experience about a million times more fun than the consumer drone. Now I will say this, the consumer drone has a camera on it. And the consumer drones camera will send a feed up to your cell phone. And the feed is freaking amazing. It’s gorgeous. It’s this thing will go for kilometers and kilometers. And I’m not going to bust out specs because it’s not, it’s not where I’m at right now in this video. But like I said, this thing is utilitarian. This thing’s for capturing awesome footage. This thing right here is for just balls to the walls. Fun.

I mean, I don’t know how else to put it.

This thing is incredibly fun and it’s infinitely challenging. There’s always new that you can do to challenge yourself. All right. So I’m going to hit you with some really, really good news, regardless of which direction you decide to go, whether it be the hobby side or the consumer side, this needs to be your first drone. This is a $30 drone. As a matter of fact, it’s 60 bucks, but it comes with three batteries of batteries, about $10 a piece. So this is a cheap plastic DJI knockoff. Okay. Uh, just so that you’d get a feeling for the size. This thing is super small, super cute, folds up, just like the DJI one, actually put it in here. You can actually put it in the breast pocket of a shirt. Uh, thing is amazing. Folds up. Here’s the deal on this thing. You can fly this thing indoors and you can crash it into just about everything that you could possibly think of, um, except for the dog or the cat.

Don’t, don’t do that and try to try to avoid the TV too. Um, so maybe I had to caveat that by saying, be careful when flying inside, but you can fly this baby inside and it will hit the wall and it will hit the floor and it will, it will just get right back up and fly point being, this is an unbelievably cheap way of learning how to fly. This thing has the same flight characteristics, uh, in terms of stick movements as the other two drones. Now there’s no GPS or anything like that. So it’s a little harder to fly than the DJI, but that’s a good thing. Um, you need to learn how to fly. You need to learn how to fly. You can’t be flying. Uh, you can’t be flying with the training wheels on all times. So amazing, amazing thing. I will leave a link in the description for where you can get one of these things.

So what do you do if you want to buy a consumer drone, you’ve bought this one, you’ve outgrown it. And you’re like, okay, time to move up. Well, guess what? For $399, you can get the DJI Mavic mini, okay. This Maverick mini kind of a comparison thing. And then this is, I need more real estate. Let’s go ahead and do this. All right. Get a feel. You have to ignore my wires and stuff. All right. So we’ve already talked about this guy. He’s out of the picture. All right. Um, this is a Maverick mini, a DJI Mavic mini. It has got a camera on it. And I’m going to go ahead and tell you right now, but then Maverick many for $399 takes amazing footage. Here’s some footage here that, uh, my son shot, uh, within 24 hours of getting the Maverick many. And the camera is it’s awesome.

It is absolutely freaking amazing for a non-professional. Alright. You can take this thing on vacation and get killer killer killer footage. Uh, that will be the envy of your friends and relatives all for the amazing low price of $399. I remember when I was flying my humongous drones, uh, back in the day, when the GoPro alone, my hero three, the GoPro alone costs $399 let alone. I had another three grand in the drones, uh, and this takes better footage than my $3,500 rig with a GoPro three on it that I was using back in 2015. And this thing fits in my shirt pocket, take a look at how big my helicopter here is and this thing freaking beats it. All right. So, um, I’ll go ahead. I don’t know, off the top of my head I’ll I’ll go ahead and put what the specs are for the camera on this thing.

This thing is GPS satellite. It has it flies just like it’s big brother. Uh, it struggles in the wind, uh, much more than its big brother. And I’m going to tell you something that I’ve never heard anybody else say on YouTube. You’ve gotta be careful with this thing because when my son’s flying, I don’t know what kind of birds they are. I don’t know whether they’re Hawks or crows or what, but they attack this thing like nobody’s business. So you are, you run a greater likelihood of getting attacked by a bird and crashing this thing. Then you will crash this thing because you’re a poor flyer. Once again, GPS the same app, same everything, uh, regarding its bigger brother. So $399 on bull lievable this baby right here was eight 99, $899. Uh, it shoots I think 2.7 I’ll I’ll I’ll include the spec all include the spec here on the screen.

Just like the little brother it’s got three axis gimbal, amazing. Just, just jaw dropping, amazing footage out of this half inch sensor. I think it’s 2.7 K. Um, wow. Wow. Wow. This thing is all a regular person would ever need to shoot footage to have fun. This is such a, such a fun drone. And, uh, this is the Maverick air to highly recommend the Maverick air to now something I don’t have, um, that you can jump up to. It looks very similar to this is the Maverick pro two. I believe, uh, the Mavic pro has a full one inch sensor. So it’s twice as much as this one. I think it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 1900 or something like that, but $1,900 for a one inch sensor camera that for a drone that will go several kilometers. And it’s still only this big, I mean, this thing, this Is amazing. I’m gonna go ahead and give you kind of a size comparison. There’s there’s the, there’s the, uh, math air to that is that’s a galaxy.

That’s the math mini and that’s the introductory one. So why am I only talking about DJI drones? Well, I’ll tell you why. When I bought my first consumer drone, I was trying very, very hard to not jump on the DJI bandwagon. So I bought the Autel Evo two, which was more in lines of the Maverick, uh, pro too. It had a 4k camera on it and it took amazing footage, but the flight characteristics were so bad. Now keep in mind. I bought it when it first came out, I got one of the original, original batches. And I, I don’t know whether they’ve done a firmware update to fix this or not, but that thing turned like a school bus. I don’t even know how to describe it to you. The Alltel Evo basically would yall and slide and that’s all it did it to try to get it to ya and roll at the same time was nearly a possible because it wanted to self write itself so badly.

So I didn’t try to be a, a fan boy. Um, as a matter of fact, I tried to avoid it, but you know what? These things are just so good. Uh, I had to, I had to dive into the DGI ecosystem and here I am. And, um, I don’t know. I don’t know whether I could say I’m a big fan or not, but they’ve just fly. So fricking good. Uh, it’s it’s hard to hate them. Okay. It’s just hard to hate them. All right. So that is the consumer side of things. Let’s take a look at, uh, let’s take a look closer, look at the hobbyist side of things. All right. So if you have decided that you’re on the hobby side of things, but you’re very, very nervous about, uh, uh, building them, then I’ve got some good news for you because they come in three different flavors.

Flavor. Number one is something called RTF, which is ready to fly. This is a ready to fly drone, and I can get the box out of the way. Check this out in one box, you get a fully built drone. Okay. And you get the radio to go with it. Okay. And basically what you do is you charge all the batteries and a logic would dictate that you would be able to just start flying. Now I will say this, um, I’ve never bought one of these. This one is on loan to me from a friend. Uh, it’s never been flown. And it is just an example that I wanted to give you, um, a R T F or ready to fly drown. All right. Let’s take a look at the next step. As it pertains to these hobbyist drones, we, we talked about, um, ready to fly or RTS.

And if you take a look at this little Emacs, tiny Hawk to this, you’re going to see marketed as either BNF, which is bind and fly or a RTF, which is almost ready to fly. Okay. So BNF or almost ready to fly. And the reason for that is because you saw the packaging right here. That’s all you get when you buy it. It’s assuming that you already have a radio. Um, this already has the little receiver on it that is going to talk to this radio transmitter. So it ships with the receiver, but it does not ship with the transmitter. You need to buy your own transmitter. And if you’re serious about getting into this hobby and you’re going to buy a nice transmitter, there really is no substitute for this radio master, TX 16 S uh, be on the lookout for a multi-part series on this radio alone.

That’s how much I love this radio. So anyhow, so that’s bind in fly by and, and fly means. You’re just buying the drone alone. Now this guy’s little and cute and everything like that, but there are BNS for, um, you know, five inch quad, six inch quads and stuff like that as well. Um, meaning the bigger ones like this is six inch right there. All right. So BNF bind and fly. You know, once you get into this hobby and you get a radio, uh, and if you buy a multi-protocol radio like this TX 16 S by radio master, or a jumper T 16, or jumper T 18 multiprotocol radios are the only way to go, because they’ll be able to fly lots of different quads from lots of different manufacturers. Don’t fall into the trap of getting sucked into one manufacturer’s ecosystem. Like for example, fr sky, if you buy fr sky nowadays, uh, you will most likely not be able to bind to this guy right here.

This, this right here is a multi-protocol radio and will bind to many, many, many different radios. I’ve got a video on that as well, and I’ll link to it in the description. Okay? So this is the moment that I’ve been waiting for. This is my absolute favorite kind of build, which is a scratch build. And there’s a lot of parts here, and this is pretty intimidating, and this is the hardest way to go. But I’m going to tell you right now, it is the single most rewarding way to fly when you build it from scratch and it gets up there in the air. It’s just amazing. So let’s dive in, you’re going to need a frame. Not all frames are alike. Don’t settle for one of the little cheapo cheapo ones that are 11 bucks, because you’ll get all kinds of problems. Like, uh, you won’t get all the hardware that you need sometimes.

And the, sometimes the circles don’t line up with each other and you’re basically wasted a bunch of money. So there’s a frame. I got four motors here, uh, motors come and clockwise and counterclockwise. So make sure that you get the right kind. All right, let’s talk about the single most important part of the whole thing, which is the brain. This is a cocoon F seven, a flight controller. This is the brain of the system. And, uh, this flight controller is going to receive information from this. This is the radio receiver. Uh, obviously you have the radio transmitter in your hand and you move the sticks. This is what, uh, gets those inputs. And this talks directly to the brain. Okay? And then the brain basically tells these, which are electronic speed controls or ESCs. There is one ESC for each motor and fight control that tells the ESC to tell the motors how fast to spin.

And that’s essentially how it flies. Now, I’m going to get into some of the variables, and I’m not going to go into details because I am going to do in-depth videos, uh, on this F seven build later, this is a power distribution board that you may or may not use depending on what kind of flight controller you have. Obviously we’re going to need propellers. All right, here, we have the FPV camera right here. This is the radio transmitter that transmits the images from our camera back down to the goggles that we will be wearing on our head. So there’s that. And then there’s a lot of different variations. So that’s not an exhaustive list of everything that you need to be able to fly. I will cover that in another video. Uh, what I will do is I will leave an exhaustive list on everything that you need to fly in the description below so that you can purchase a straight from a list of a tried and true products that I use.

I probably remember that I mentioned that you need for E S C’s or electronic speed controllers, one for each motor. Um, but in recent years, they’ve come up with a four in one ESE, which it looks like this. So definitely subscribe to the channel because I got two F seven builds coming down the road. One is going to be an F seven build with the Fort ESCs and then the other one is going to be, uh, one with a foreign one ESE build. So I’m excited about building both of those, and that’s about as much detail as I wanted to go into right here. Definitely check back later. Cause way more on that. All right. So what’d you think, hopefully I was able to dissect it in a way to where you were able to eliminate half of the drone market, uh, based on whether or not you’re a consumer person or a hobbyist person.

And then of course, my intent was to further break down each 50% category down, even further to help you decide where you fall and what drone makes the most sense for you to purchase this one wins in the fun category, hands down, this one wins in the productivity category, hands down. All right. So I’m going to wrap it up here because I’m starting to repeat myself. Uh I’m Steve, I hope you found value in the video, and if you like the videos, please feel free to share them so that I get more than three views on my, uh, all my drone videos, uh, lots and lots more to come. Uh, I’m getting ready to do a multi-part series on this baby right here. Um, this radio absolutely astoundingly. Amazing. So that’s coming down the road. I’m gonna do the F seven build. I’ve got man, I’ve got ideas for dozens and dozens and dozens of drone videos, so they will all be forthcoming. So please subscribe, hit the bell and, uh, I’ll see you in the next video. Thanks.