Connect Any Transmitter To FPV Simulator | BETAFLIGHT GAME CONTROLLER 

Amazing advice, thank you Josh. I'm a 43 year old total noob pilot and have purchased a couple of Mobula 7s to start whooping around my house and garden. As I made the mistake of trying to fly FPV before actually learning how to fly a drone, I've been crashing a LOT. Now, I've decided to learn to control the craft first, then I'll move to FPV once I'm a little more confident that I've built up a little muscle memory when it comes to actually controlling the darn thing! This hack, twinned with the kickass (and free) Tiny Whoop Go simulator has been an absolute godsend. I'm now working my way through the training exercises using my Spektrum Dx6i instead of my xbox controller. It's tougher but definitely way more helpful when I come to transfer back to the real world again tomorrow when the sun comes up. Thanks again!

I already have a frsky usb dongle that I use with liftoff and after watching this video, I had an F4 flight doing nothing and a spare R-XSR so I set it up as per your instructions and it works a treat, thank you to you and the person who got this feature working.

Joshua, your Channel ROCKS! I like a lot of other channels but many of them are Review oriented. Your channel is very centric to the education level of Drone education ranging from the beginner level all the way to the deeper end of the technical spectrum. I am new to the FPV hobby but I am an Engineer with many years of experience where I benefit from the deep technical knowledge that you often take the channel.

Awesome work BF. Very impressed and glad to see a feature that is so beneficial in helping the community grow!!!!!!!!

I don’t care what anybody says!!....this is an awesome feature!!!.....thank you for whoever came up with it and thank you Joshua for letting the world know about it!!!!🙏🙏👏👏

Hey Joshua. Thanks for this. Works great. Just a note I used my actual quad and had to plug in my battery to power my RX. A word of warning if this is your case as well. The quad still arms if connected to the sim so take your props off lol. The FC also eventually starts beeping in beacon mode which is annoying. So flip your arm switch on and off (props off) and it stops. Thanks for all the great content.

Man you are an angel... I just gave up on connecting my fs i6 to my computer and started playing with a xbox Controller and than i watched your Video! Thanks so much

Wow, completely missed this upload JB. Outstanding! And here we are at the doorway to BF 4.0 :-)

This is why I subcribe to the know it all. I've never been able to play a sim. Today I'll see if I can give it a try! Many thanks Joshua. Flysky user here, great news for us pilots!

its been over a year since flying a quad really grateful for this....thanks can practice before I take to the skies

I have a fs i6 and this was super helpful. I tried using smart propo plus and it didn't work on my computer. This did and I am so thankful. Your videos have been such a great help as I have built and am learning to fly my first fpv quad!

This is awesome! Just flew over 2 hours in the sim... no more latency than using the usb cable and I can hold my controller the way I want without the cord in the way! Awesome! (Using crazybee F4 whoop board) thanks Josh you rock!

Nice Josh! And thank you Betaflight developers! Just as an option for others without f4 boards, hobby king has the dsmx/flysky wireless dongles for $16 in the US. I’ve purchase some 20+ dongles for students this year and they work great!

Thank you. Good video. I'm just starting out in FPV and this is sorta really hard to get it all together. I like your initial advice. Crash the sim drone 200+ times and get to the point where you can see the limitations of the sim.

"Take your props off, you dufus!" - J. Bardwell , 2018 Looooved that. Thanks for a rare morning chuckle!

I can confirm it works on mac.. didn't do anything special it just worked.. i was playing freerider recharged and worked a treat.. nice work betaflight crew its awesome..

Josh is the best!!!!!!! Nobody better on explaining how she's done!!!!! Big THANKS!!!!!!

Dude, thanks for this. So glad I invested in the betaflight F7 FC now :)

Just keeps getting better.TY JB

You are the best Josh. Thank you for all your good news

Found this a long time after it was published, but for anyone interested, I did some latency measurements on a Unity based Sim. Using a QX7 via an XSR/OmnibusF4 combo (D16), the delay from switch press to screen change is 80mS up to about 100mS (lots of asynchronous activities, the variability is probably dependent on where you catch them). Swap that for a direct USB connection and it knocks about 20mS off, so the RF approach is about 20mS worse. Not surprising when you consider the extra stages invloved. For comparison, switch to some FC action (real quad) is about 20 to 40mS, averages about 30mS. Much faster, a lot of the Sim delay is probably the PC driver mechanism. However, it is not a fair comparison. To genuinely compare the quad and Sim you would need to add in the camera to FPV screen/goggles delay on the quad, because that is all part of the control loop. Don't know what that is, but maybe 20-30mS. So, in reality, the Sim response is fairly close to the quad, but the Sim Rx link makes it about 20mS worse compared to USB. I find this noticeably affects my speed and likelihood of crashing on a Sim. Would like to try the genuine FrSky Sim USB dongle - it might be faster as there may be less processing stages involved - but I don't have one.

Fantastic, JB! I'm going to try it! 😀 One tip that looks like most people don't know: you can setup switches of the Taranis in Liftoff. What you need to do is to set the switches from channel 9 upwards (9, 10, 11 and so on). Then, on Liftoff, you go to options, control, buttons and set them in the right column. But the switches only works as 2 way switches. But you can have a switch to arm, another to pause, another to reset and so on. 😊

Thanks for the help! You do a lot for the community!

Just what I was looking for right now, thanks from Australia.

This works great! Much better than the cable I was dragging around

Been looking forward to this feature for a long time!

Thank you for yet another awesome video Joshua! Your videos have helped me out so much! :-D

Simple ideas Are always the best and this one is right up there!

Finally a decent reason to get a betaflight board ;) … thanks Joshua, this was very helpful

Awesome! I'm flashing that old BabyHawk board right now.

Now my old Omnibus F4 is back in business. Great 😀

Thanks for the video, Josh. I just realized my Boxer and I wanted to get used to it.

Yes Yes Yes!! I've been using this cruddy old Dynam usb simulator thing forever.. It worked, and made me think I was a really terrible pilot! I've been using my fs-i10 all day and turns out I wasn't as bad as I thought.

Nice, great stuff JB🤙🏻

Wow! This was unexpected... Being one of the few radiolink users that I know, I always felt deprived of a great simulator experience. Thanks for the heads up!

5 years ago and I just did this for the first time. Looks like could be more reliable than the elrs bluetooth which never worked for me, neat!

Sweet you made the video I ask you to thank you josh that's freaking awesome man. Thank you

Omg where was this video when I got started 😂😂😭😭😭😭 thanks JB for the video it's helped loads

Classic Joshua B.!!! Thanks for the amazing information!!

never been so happy to see josh holding a flysky transmitter ,,id love for him to do a range test on them ,they can go quite far apprently i havent gone to far with mine im to scared of a failsafe lol

Omg than you I’ve been told I can’t play sims this whole time cause I have the tinygo gr8 radio but it works now!!!

If you can compile your own betaflight it's pretty easy to get rid of stuff you don't want (like GPS or protocols you don't use) and make space for this on an F3 board.

Awesome! I'll try it tonight. I have so many FC and receiver that I'm not using!

Thanks for sharing your knowledge!👍🏽🤙🏽😃

Thnx JB, might give it a try

Thanks a lot! It was always incredibly frustrating when I couldn't use sims with my fs-i6.

This is really cool. It would be awesome if you could fly your quad with the PIDs and rates in Betaflight on the FC within the sim on an identically specced quad. That would be like your drone was dreaming inside your sim. And ultimate practice.

very nice info indeed I supported your channel last night

Thx dude i just happened to lose my crappy homemade flysky audio cable. Not to mention i’m trying to make a fpv game and it was impossible without this kind of solution!

Awesome view brother!

Brilliant, thank you so much. These BG and other dongles are more about the "pirated" simulators than the connections JB. Love this method, Velocidrone here I come! lol

Thanks for the great info!

You do good things Mr. Bardwell.

This is awesome! Thank you 😁😁😁

I will be using this feature, tired of the USB cable coming out of the bottom of my Q7S. Sometimes it comes unplugged in the middle of a simulator session. FPVModel had their X-Racer F4 on sale the other day for $20 so I jumped on it. Got an XM RX and I'm going to build a little box for my USB connection using an old 3S battery. Wish I had kept an old F4 I threw away because of solder pad issues, would have been perfect.

We are not worthy of the betaflight developers. Great work!

Ive watched a lot of your videos over the last year, and you know what? I learned something! Thanks for this one especially. I've been wanting to get into fpv for a while but with a radiolink transmitter i could never get the sims to work. Now I'm going to give it a try! My first custom build is an old dji flamewheel with a cc3d, is there a good f4 or f7 board you would recommend for this frame?

I like that simulator. The last time I used one (3 years ago) I had one, but it was like flying with moon gravity on. Evidently things have changed.

About time Betaflight catches up... Have been using KissVJoy for years on the Kiss platform.

I have 3 older RC Helicopters sitting around with one having a Spectrum DX6 so I will give it a try instead of heading out and buying a new Radio Transmitter controller, Thanks

I love my Futaba conquest- its still like new and I was learning without help and got pile of trashed old planes! after long time: im making new trainer foam planes! Can my receiver for planes be hooked up to sim ?

Thank you very much!

Hi Joshua, thanx for the amazing video as always. Can you do a a review on Lift off or DRL & let us know which one is good as you always show amazing videos like that 😊. We all appreciate the work U do & that U have done for the FPV world, we need people like U, thanx for everything!

Thank you Joshua

Thank you, I wish I saw this video before I bought the Flysky Sm100 USB adopter.

Love it! Big Thanks!

Thank you so much!!!

First Spectrum guys just get the fpv dongle I think is more expensive if you'd get a flyboard and a satellite

thanks so much!

that is pretty awesome... however there is a few options still... buy a "22 in 1 rc flight simulator cable" and it'll use the trainer port set it to the VRC setting (at least on mine) and the computer uses it as a joystick controller... it's wired but it works fine, I use my taranis and then my son uses his frsky without issue.

Buddy Fried the USB Port of my qx7... Now i found this, no need to replace the Mainboard 👍

Thank You ! 👍😀

In case anyone searched the description and didn't find the command: set usb_hid_cdc = on

Thank you!

Turnigy Evolution plugs in as a general joystick. And it is charges from USB, wich is cool.

Too Frickin Cool... Thanks!

absolute valid point. My story short. Bought a racing drone, flew less then 5 minutes. my drone crashed into a river and that was my drone.

I just got to work and now you're telling me this

How can this man be so smart?

Can't you do a video about prop types? Thanks for lots of nice content.. 👍

This is going to be a lifesaver!! I suck at acro but love fpv drones!!! I really hope this will work on my old laptop that runs windows 7??? THANKS GREAT CHANNEL!!!. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 👍😀👍 I know im not that smart but man i can not get one to work!!!

Works great! Got a cheap OBF4 and an XM RX. FC powers the RX with USB, so don't need a battery. Only problem I've encountered is after enabling the USB command it turns the FC into a game controller and it's no longer a com port and BF doesn't recognize it so it can't connect. Only way to I found to turn it off was to use the bootloader and rewrite the firmware. Easy enough with my dedicated FC but not if you use a highly configured quad.

My friend resolved his issue on Mac. For people who are on Mac & use the dongle (need to put on G5/G7 Above) = doesn't work on USB3. Just need to connect a USB2 hub on USB3 & it works. Surely it can be helpfull.

Brilliant!

Thanks soooo much 😅

smoked an F4 trying to turtle recently. I use a tablet to sim with and HATE the cable... this will ROCK if it actually works. will update shortly (@2 hours after home from work)

Please do a video about the new Absolute Control feature in 3.4

Normally which ' connecting cable ' we need to use to directly connect Futaba 10 j to PC simulator

thanks again I had drl but would not connect. All is well now.

I don't think the program memory on the F3 boards is the issue, it is because the F4/7 support multiple USB devices... or... it would be possible to use an old F3 board just for the simulator with a slimmed down build!

Great Stuff Josh, What about a DJI transmitter? will that also work on simulator?

You can also connect your receiver to arduino. I think it was limited to PPM/IBUS Receiver but there is a script for using sbus receiver too.

Would there be any negative to putting your vtx into pit mode? Would this keep the heat down enough to sit there while I fly on the simulator? Thanks!

Meuu deus esse cara tem me salvado muito!!!!! obrigado.

I watched this video months ago but i didn't have an F4 board. I finally got hold of a Betaflight F4 v3 yesterday and tried connecting my FS-IA6B. Uart6 seems to be unusable with the FS-IA6B but luckily it works on Uart3. So the covid lockdown continues on a simulator. ;-)

Yesss!!!! Victoryyy!!! Betaflight rules!

Hi, Do you know if I can use the skycontroller 2 with a simulator?

this feature is just awesome... i was thinking about this like a month ago and i had to use the audio input to play, which is not very reliable... it will be great to use the quad as interface... i am just surprised how this was not done sooner... but still need to find a way to prevent video transmitter from overheating... any thoughts how to shut it off?

I wasn't too disappointed with the SmartPropoPlus solution. It worked quite nice after fiddling together a mono cable... Too bad that this new feature requires F4 or higher though...

I need your HELP! Thank u so much! I am i step closer now :) DRL SIM on calibration says: Failed. Couldn't Detect Channel. I run MacOs Mojave I must leave also the betaflight open and connected, no need right?