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.