SPI-based ExpressLRS receivers are the worst 

Man, i have been watching your videos and I must say, they are goood. Nice and clear and complete. Subscribed!

Thank you, i am new on the fpv world and i bought a toothpick with a SPI based ELRS reciever but i was having so much trouble with updating the ELRS version and setting up the binding phrase, this tutorial/explanation helped me alot in both ways 😀

I just got the jumper t pro and a mobula 7 about 10 days ago to get into Elrs and was having a hell of a time trying figure out the whole process with flashing and binding phrase ans so on. I never did flash anything on the jumper or the mobula , but managed to find the lua in the jumper that had the word bind, and used the bind function in the receiver tab of betaflight and got it all working and got the radio and quad to bind. But, wow was I confused watching your other video and about 20 other videos on the subject, my brain had turned to mush and was about to give up on Elrs. Now I understand a little more after watching this video. Thanks Joshua. ;-) (The mobula 7 has a spi based receiver with no wifi)...

Very excited for the Mobeetle6 review! I'm loving mine, I landed it 2 times already in my kittens water trays and it's still working. I have never had an RC this durable.

Thanks for this. I just got one of these recently, and happy model has zero information about these spi receivers. I contacted them and got ghosted... I ended up finding this info on the eLRS sites spi page, but it took hunting and frustration. This video will help a bunch of folks not go through what I did.

Would have saved me te most part of the weekend if this was mentioned in the complete ELRS tutorial video.😅 Glad I finally found this. Great video

Here is the model match gotcha with ExpressLRS. The module saves just about all the settings for each model match number. This includes whether model match is on or off and it does this even if the model match feature is not enabled. If you set up your first quad on model match number 1 and turn it on in the module and receiver it works. Then you go to add a second quad that has different settings and it’s easy to forget that when you switch to number 2, you need to redo all the module settings including turning on model match for that number. This does allow for not really using model match but creating multiple configurations with different settings. You could have a long range and short range model for the same quad, for example.

They could add binding phrase to the BF UI (I guess that's what's going to happen eventually), but the CLI just sends the commands directly to the FC and I guess they didn't want to bloat the ROM by adding the hashing function to command handler on the FC side.

Thanks for the video Josh!

Love the Explanation! Any ideas where one could find that SWEET Shirt though? 😃

actually works very good now with 4.4.0 betaflight, but i was very confuse as i was trying to wifi flash it. thanks for the video

Hello, I have not had any problem (mobula6 elrs) yesterday I updated the tx to 2.5, copied the luas to the station and from betaflight I put 4.3 stable, in the receiver tab you hit bind and in the luas too, good without problems, 0 failures 🤷

For my SPI ELRS FC I simply uploaded latest BF firmware and then clicked the bind button in the receiver tab which did the trick somehow without UID, etc.

Great video JB! Thanks

SPI RX is good for FC whoop for simplicity and liteweight. I think whoop pilots only need the basic important functions of RX-TX which are link quality, stability and low latency and I think improvements are not always nor should be new features. I just hope AIO FC with SPI RX will keep exists and work for future version of ELRS release ... don't mind if it stuck or limited to current available features.

You are the best! I have a Happymodel mobula 7 1s Whoop and until your video I didn't know about SPI. Now my Whoop is flying. Question: how do I found my binding phrase from my radio, if I forget it? Thanks!

Hello Josué, as always, a pleasure to see your videos, but I have a question at the end of the video, you say how to link from cli I have done it as you mention but I cannot link. Do I have to touch any other parameter that I have missed?... I use radiomaster zorro with an external module and I have linked other elrs but this one resists me.

is spi similar to like spectrum sSRXL2 micro telemetry receiver, after all these different rfs and protocols, spektrum,frysky,crsf,tracer. i finally had to buy a radiomaster ranger module for a elrs 3.0 receiver . the micro and nonos were on back order so i bought the cnc one for 2watts over 1 watt hopefully, i wanted to avoid the whole xt30 pcb external power issue

Great information thx

Thanks!

Just got the diamond elrs built in fc. Going to build my own moblite7.

Thanks Joshua 👊🏻

As long as the new versions of ELRS TX firmware are backwards compatible with the BF SPI RX versions there's no problem with the different projects beeing out of sync in release schedule. If it works it works, do not update. 🙂

Joshua I have a FrSky radio and use it for fixed wing, helis & quads. Horus X10s Express. I'd like to try ELRS in some quads. Is there an external module I can use for this radio? Cheers 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

I honestly think this is the better way, even if the ELRS devs don't agree. Most pilots will setup their quad, find a sweet spot, and not touch the software again unless they have to. ELRS development may move fast, but most users probably don't mind much, especially since the ELRS firmware is forwards/backwards compatible within the major version number. Maybe the Maintenance release branch can be used to push ELRS updates faster, or create a new release branch specifically for SPI ELRS.

I've been stumped for a week, thanks for the solution.

The ExpressLRS firm used by BF-4.3 is 2.0. Can work with all TX firm 2.X , but no with 1.X.

hey just watched the video and used the bind phrase to connect to my beta85pro2, in betaflight in the radio tab if i'm moving my stick to full throttle it's jumping from 0 to 2000 where my stick is and also my radio is not showing i'm connected to the quad no telemetry recovered or disconnected notifications i'm so confused.

It is another option. In the future if we can't update spi ELRS receivers, we can install an external ep2 on spare UARTS.

Bryan just posted on FB about how elrs spi may be over soon and moving more to an AIO with a separate processor for the elrs rx.

Oh no I just got a SPI ELRS Mobula6 as my first FPV which gets delivered in a week and now I'm worried, but it doesn't sound too bad for something like that I guess. Its just something small and durable to learn off of inside a small house before getting something else for outside

There a a Whoop FC my JHEMCU that has ELRS built into the board but it used a UART and has WIFI!

There was a post on the elrs fb saying that the spi interface is deprecated.

"SPI receivers DO NOT support D(D250, D500), F(F500, F1000) and Full Res(100Hz Full Res, 333Hz Full Res) Modes (Packet Rates) and thus will not bind or sync with a TX module in any of these modes." This is what let me finally bind.

Have you ever wondered what's up with the binding phrase? It's a mac address for the ESPNOW unicast communication protocol.

I have two HM AIO CrazyF4 ELRS 915 whoopboards that are using a uart an use csrf .....just flashed both with 3.0 👍

One thing I've heard is running the PID loop on anything other than 2khz will spike cpu utilization due to the cpu timing running the eLRS firmware code in the PID loop. CPU is around 35% on a 2khz loop on my mobula 6.

I have it on a whoop board. Doesn't go far. I haven't had an issue yet. Also fly out a window to outside. I wouldn't put on bigger quad. I just upgraded to 4.4 to get elrs3 thpugh my whoop is broke. Motor wire pulled out the motor

I got my first elrs whoop recently, a mobula7 and I've had some issues. Before watching this video, I assumed flashing bf4.4 was the easiest way to bind but it would appear that my issues start as soon as I flash 4.4...one or more of the esc seem to brick after that has been done. When checked in bl heli suite or bl heli, it says erased or unknown fw. Does anyone know how to rectify that?

so my Radiomaster ZORRO has ELRS 3.0 Should I flash the new ELRS for the Mobula7 1s? since it 'SPI FRSKY'?

What about the spi receiver embedded in the sp racing H7 ?

i think that (at least in my experience) telemetry must be turned off on SPI elrs receivers, otherwise it wont bind i dont know if this works for serial receivers too...

This is really only a problem for me, when there's a big update, which requires you to update the ELRS version on your transmitter as well. Because then you need to delay this update on ALL of your quads until it's avaible for your FC. Otherwise I don't always need the latest and greatest on such a tiny micro-whoop.

If i power the kwad but not the TX, the EP2 stats to flash and won't connect, is this normal?

Use the Bind button on the Receiver Tab... Super easy and takes 2 seconds. ELRS V3 includes the ability to integrate the analog vtx. So we should see whoops with integrated serial Rx in the near future.

Thanks for this great informations Please can you tell me what is better?? I want to buy mobula7 1s elrs and are two obtions 1 --elrs integrated spi (flight controller is 1s only and have mpu 6000) or 2 without receiver and add an ep2 on uart(flight controller is 1 and 2s but have another giro chip not mpu600)

If ELRS 3.0 comes out with unified targets it would probably be much simpler to integrate the ELRS code with betaflight.

I thought a reason for the 1.x and 2.x naming scheme was because all version 2.x hardware should at least have the basic functionality to work with all 2.x hardware. So you should be able to update your tx to the newest 2.x version even if the spi receiver is stuck on 2.1

Can a SPI based ELRS receiver be disabled on a flight controller? If yes, how? Or is it disabled if I connect an external receiver and enable the uart?

*FACEPALM* I've had this HX115LR for MONTHS trying to get it to work and only just now found the "V 2.1" stamp on the bottom, which makes it a DIFFERENT version than the one in your tutorial, which worked for the second HX I bought (a v1) when I couldn't get the first to work. Only watching this video after watching the HX setup guide do I finally understand wtf I was doing wrong. THANK YOU even though you didn't even know you were getting this figured out for me after so many months of fruitless efforts to get these working.

6 months ago I flew my first ELRS quad, the Crux35 and it was SPI Receiver based. I was blown away at the range (1+ mile) and penetration that could be achieved an SPI ELRS receiver, and I still fly that quad now as it's one of my favorites. I thought for sure that this would be the future of whoops and micros. But as the months have gone by, I have watched the constant firmware updates by the BF team to address ELRS issues. As much of a fan as I have been of SPI ELRS for getting us away from god-awful FrSky and FlySky SPI receivers, I was wondering how the issues with the updates were going to play out. Today one of the ELRS developers Bryan Mayland stated that "SPI hardware should not be considered" in his opinion. And that "ExpressLRS 2.x works fine, but when 3.0 RC starts in a couple weeks, SPI RX will not work at all due to changes in the over-the-air formatting... SPI hardware is already obsolete in the eyes of the development team as that information should be known before making your next whoop." That was sad for me to hear… but it is understandable why. I wish there was a way for there to be some middle ground, but a dedicated UART looks like the only real solution. I don't think whoop or micro flyers necessarily cared about access to every new shiny feature ELRS brought to the table, we just wanted a stable, fast link that didn't suck. But as a programmer I see the challenge of trying to add new features while worrying about what's going on in SPI receiver code baked into BF that can't be updated easily - it must have been a nightmare. Integrated serial RX then, is the only way forward. Also, you can just hit the bind button on the rx tab which makes things a whole lot easier.

ok so I got through all of this and I have my spi receiver bound and i can see the inputs in betaflight but there's a huge delay and it's really choppy and when I try to arm it i get an error code saying "bad rx" or "rx lost". Does anyone have any ideas how to fix this? I'm using the BetaFPV F4 1S 12A AIO flight controller and the BetaFPV ELRS Nano module in a lite radio 3

I have a question, if I've bound an SPI ELRS receiver in betaflight by using the bind command, then doing the same in the ELRS LUA does that mean that the receiver fetched my binding phrase from my module or is it somehow bound without a binding phrase?

Can you bind an upgraded radio controller with 3.0 with a spi receiver which is only in betaflight based elrs 2.0? I was zero successful even after putting same passphrase by wifi on radio and cli to receiver. Really frustrated by hundreds of tries to bind the iflight commando and the mobula 7

Great overview as usual....😳🤔😀🇬🇧

I have a question that has nothing to do with this vid, but I'm new to drones and figured you'd have an answer, but also you would probably check these comments sooner than later lol. I have a Eachine Wizard X220S FPV Racer RC Drone Omnibus F4 5.8G 40CH 30A Dshot600 800TVL Flysky FS-i6X RTF, and a BetaFPV FPV Whoop Racing RTF Advanced Kit 2. I think I prefer the radio that came with the Whoop over the bigger Flysky. I watched your vid on the Radiomaster Zorro. Would that be a good choice for me moving forward with more drone purchases in the near future and would it bind to the 2 I already have? I don't want to have a different radio for every drone.

Thanks Joshua, here’s hoping 🤞🏼the binding gods are merciful 🤔

Got be honest with you...I could have used this when I got a Meteor65 pro Axis /Thor combo.... Oh well there's a first for everything, lol. Cheers

Also can't update to the new 3.0 elrs I just got the baby ape freestyle that thing looks like it rips

This what I do, read changelog, worth it=update after week or more to be sure no bugs, changelog not worth = no update, I had many troubles in the past for updating my pc/phone every time there new one that taught me " if its not broken, don't fix it " I know you addressing issue here, but may scares some Pilots from going to spi-elrs specially newbe.

Can I bind these spi elrs receivers with my taranis r9m module or not ? Does anyone know about it ?

Can I get rssi dbm on spi reciver? I'm trying 😪

I have a crux 35 ELRS and i have on disarm a Loop saying "Telemetry lost/ telemetry recover". On arm loop does not exit anymore but sometimes i have failsafe very very close to me (less than 50m !!) I don't know what to do. Crux recommend ELRS 2.0 i'm on 2.0. They recommend 250ghz, i'm on 250ghz. I can't fly safety. Someone told me that there's issue with BF and spi elrs with BMI270 (because of Dshot 300 and a low pid loop.) I really don't know what to do. Any solution someone ?

i mean, its really good for light hardware. it sounds like they just ditched the whole elrs processor and are just running the radio chip and letting that giant arm chip you already have on the flight controller run the code. probably a step in the right direction, but with growing pains. Would be awesome if you could use that new presets picker to select elrs, but i know that doesnt actually recompile the code. Honestly, i wouldnt care about being several elrs revisions behind. I just want to get a good radio link and then never mess with it again.

Would have been helpful to see how to flash a new version on the spi, instead of settings we can easily look up

My new Meteor65 (2022) will not let me write to the CLI. I guess this is what you are talking about.

I have a Mobula 7 ELRS and had so many failsafes at short range and not binding on power up. I tried every RC version of BF4.3, reconfigured the options many times, and went through all the troubleshooting documentation with no luck. It worked best right after flashing firmware, but usually failsafed quickly after then just wouldn't bind. I ended up soldering on an EP2 instead and it's worked flawlessly ever since. Thanks for the video Joshua, it's nice to know I didn't miss anything in the setup! Looking forward to the Mobeetle6 review.

As someone looking to get into the hobby with a limited budget, I was looking at getting a BNF quad and I guess it has SPI ELRS. Would it be a bad idea for me to get it right now? I wouldn't plan on flying anything else in the near-future, so would I really have to worry about firmware updates or anything?

Hey Josh, have I missed something here? Ok so if the rx firmware is locked, what happens if you have 2 , 3 or more whoops of different ages, and you want to fly them all on the same day do we have to juggle flashing the tx each time? If so that would be a real pain, I am just starting to dabble in this, so just trying to learn something to day, hahaha, or, are they all covered by V2 tx

Is there a way to convert uid to word? (Oposite that you've shown)?

Finally!! Elrs is getting easier. Few more months and it might actually be dumb-user friendly. I don't care about updating every month, I just wanted it to work, n it didnt. The spi way would have been alot simpler for me to get into.

Oh good. I chose the FRsky SPI receiver on my Crux35 instead of the Elrs because the frsky version has 20a ESCs and the elrs version comes with 12a ESCs. So if they both suck, that's great because I got better ESCs and didn't lose anything on the receiver side of things.

So ELRS 3.0 is out and not compatible with 2.x receivers; can my Zorro handle both 2.x and 3.x ELRS or do I need to stay on 2.x to be compatible with my Mobula 7? Or if it can't, does this mean I need to switch the Zorro back and forth between the two versions (or get 2 controllers)?

I get random failsafes even indoors close to 5ft when flying with 150hz packet rate and dynamic power on with my mobula 8. It regains connection once I disarm and rearm...have you faced an issue like this? This is very disappointing after moving to ELRS.

How do I *switch off* an SPI based receiver completely? (In this case a FrSky rx in the TH3)

well then....I am so ready for this.....very soon...

Bigger issue I can see is having your one whoop holding you back from updating your tx to the latest elrs firmware and holding all of your other elrs builds hostage to that one whoops old firmware

Hum... Interesting to know this about SPI ELRS receivers

I’ve thought about everything you mentioned in this video, but for SPI on 65mm, 75mm quads. I can live with this limitation. Everything 3” and bigger I can afford the weight of an external receiver.

SPI is literally Serial Peripheral Interface. UART is universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter. The continuous use of the word 'Serial' when they are both serial interfaces with different protocols is just confusing. It's like calling every radio control link Ghost when the physical hardware you're using is Crossfire.

If the ELRS firmware needs to be baked into BetaFlight, then what's the point of the SPI/ELRS drop down in the configurator? Conversely, what they should do is decouple these by standardizing the flight controller's receiver API and letting the ELRS firmware conform to that standard. If they did that, then BetaFlight could include a stable Rx blob, but the moment it is outdated, the Rx can be updated by updating BetaFlight (with a newer stock Rx blob), some as-yet undefined Rx firmware pass-through over SPI, or over WiFi. As long as all of the Rx firmware use the same protocol to talk to the FC over SPI, the Rx can be kept updated independently... just like the UART version.

Seems to me this is a real downside to SPI ELRS. The basic issue is that both Betaflight and ELRS are projects under active development, and they aren't synchronised - why should they be? Way too easy to get incompatibilities with the ELRS Tx which is probably going to be the common factor across multiple craft. I assume the same problem could occur with SPI FrSky or FlySky receivers, but the difference is the protocols are pretty stable. The problem really is that ELRS is moving so fast at the moment. Maybe in time it won't be. I use standalone ELRS but am about to build a whoop style quad. The FC for that will either have to be one with no Rx (most likely) so I can fit an ELRS Rx, or one with FrSky built in. I will not be looking at built in ELRS unless it is via UART link.

Am I the only one that feels SPI based recievers are better? Faster link with lower latency, less chips required on the FC which is important because today's whoop FC's are getting more compact and smaller and most have the vtx onboard, so every millimeter of space is important. And you don't need to flash the reciever, and you can just hit bind in the reciever tab (JB didn't mention that which is a super easy way to bind) AND if you have multiple whoop FC's you can just copy and paste the diff (or even better from the presets tab) and that will automatically BIND THE RECIEVER. I have 6 of the happymodel Elrs Whoop Aio's and it's super easy to just setup one board and then just load the diff to all the others and I don't have to do anything else at all. I feel like all recievers should be built into the FC and Spi connected on all flight controllers, big or small.

Yeah... I don't know what would be a solution for this. Perhaps ELRS should just stop allowing SPI receivers from 3.0 on... Or maybe from 4.0 on, I don't really know... Either way, great info, Joshua! Thanks! 😃 Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊

I really wish TBS would make a small rx/fc

After flashing i receive "###ERROR IN set: INVALID NAME###" when trying to change my UID - anyone know why the betaflight build won't take the elrs commands? - I updated with the 4.3.1 build per the update/comments

Hi, I just got this quad and for some reason it says No Gyro/Acc on betaflight. Do you know why this is happening. This is with no flight time just setup?

Sorry I got the happymodel Mobula7 hdzero.

The only issue I ALWAYS have with ELRS is the wifi always stops working after every update. It broadcasts but once you try and connect it drops off. Unless it's betafpv issue, it's happened every time on all my receivers... So I can't do wifi updates

Feels more like an implementation issue then an SPI vs UART issue. Not having looked at the actual boards with the ExpressLRS SPI implementation, it sounds more like they share CPU since the code has to be built into Betaflight, to save cost, instead of just using SPI for communication between the different functions.

Nothing like having to downgrade the Elrs in my Zorro to 2.5.1 so I can fly my "new" Mobula 7.... Should have watched this video sooner!

Sorry, when I see the target name, I only see "crazy beef" and some numbers. Thanks for the tutorial, though. I'm going to need it. Why does this have to be so complicated?!

The biggest problem with isolated open source projects.

This UART based integrated receiver is amazing! I’m super happy with what ELRS is doing and coming up with! @Trappy needs to get Crossfire catching up!! Integrated Crossfire would be dope too!!

SPI is considerably faster especially when you run express LRS at 500Hz. Do you know what data rates the UARTs run? 115200 is pretty standard, though faster rates are possible in some cases. If you are running at 500hz, do the math on how many bytes fit into 115200, and it’s likely 500Hz just won’t fit. This may be worth the trade off.

So when you say "poor range", I guess you mean that it loses signal even inside the house? Because based on flight time, and size......I personally probably wouldn't even be flying this quad much outdoors, as I have 3.5" and mostly 5" quads for that. But perhaps many do fly these like their 5", outdoors.

.. Or you can just solder on an ep2 as i did to not get mad, i know i know, but, i wanted my babytooth to get back as soon as possible.. :D

I was also incredibly baffled why they did the binding phrase that way... and why when you type it into the configurator... if it wants the bytes WHY doesn't it just convert it right there? DUMB. I got in a betafpv aio. I put on the new version of betaflight, and flashed the FC to the newest firmware... and flashed my TX for 2.5.0 and it worked... lucky?

So am I S.O.L.??? I bought a tiny ape but I can't bind it to my Zorro because the tiny ape has the rx at 2.0 while my tx is at 3.0??? This sucks...

Bardwell is a damn hero