After all these years of learning from your greate work, I realized today, that you are left handed. It's about the little things, that make me happy :-D AND AS ALLWAYS: ""Great job Joshua!"
Thanks sooo much Joshua, this video is proof positive for me that the more of your tutorials someone watches as they get into the hobby, or just learn a new skill, the better off they are down the road learning more in depth stuff. You're tutorial on re-mapping motors a while back, helped me in so many situations, and have gotten very comfortable doing so. Watching this video, everything seemed like a natural continuation from the re-mapping video, and I got my naked GoPro 8 on a Aux switch in no time at all. Thanks for all you do!!
Thanks man had a problem to recreate and resource the led light function for my cinebot30 o3 after switching from betaflight 4.3 to 4.5...but now i got it ! Love your vids! So go on...😊 And thanks for introducing me in the hobby 4 yesrs ago ...have built 6 quads until now and its always fun👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻 Best wisches from Germany
I have an og Runcam dvr that doesn't have an uart on it, but the start/stop button on it connects signal to gnd. I just soldered a wire from button's signal pin to the buzzer's gnd pin on flight controller. The buzzer's gnd pin is the only one that switch gnd rather than signal on a flight controller. Than I now can start/stop recording on the radio using pinio beautifully! 🙌🏻🎉🚀👍🏻 In fact using this method you can turn on/off almost any device. You just need to figure out what are their power buttons doing (connecting signal to gnd or signal to vcc) to know where to put it on the FC.
Thanks. One of the problems with software like Betalight is that the people writing the manuals assume that you know what you're doing. It took me three days to figure out that "Pinio" is a CLI function! If you're writing manuals, don't assume.
LOL, I just wired up my SMO 4K on Saturday Evening. I must have been channeling my inner Joshua. I pieced the steps together from a couple of other videos you did a while back.
Can you also switch betaflight parameters on/off with a radio switch? anti-taz runaway_takeoff_prevention parameter ON/OFF on a radio switch? Nice to not have an auto-disarm when you are stuck on a roof with 3 blades of grass around one prop. Being able to spin up to full throttle no matter what can save you an unsave trip to the rooftop. I noticed my quad was often not able to take of with just minor entanglements of one motor/prop, that I'm sure would be cut off if the prop was allowed to spin up properly (putting the throttle stick to full).
The reallity is: Digital data are decoded with on / off. That's where the name came from. Motor outputs using pulse width modulation as example to tell the ESC how he should power the motor. Simplified saying. PWM keeps the signal high for a specific percentage of an specified time frame. Analog signals are not just on/off. But they are "constructed" with an digital/analog converter they also have a resolution (8bit or 12bit...). Meaning, they can not output every value...
Woah so powerful! You could hook this up to some transistors and diy yourself a cheatercam switch or some laser tag shooting thingy or repurpose your fc to a 500hz expresslrs light switch!
With this function, wired properly, you can basically emulate a button press on a device like a Tarsier or a typical vTX. Back in the day, people would use this function to change band/channel on vTX that didn't have smartaudio.
I learned the Xilo Stax FC can switch power on and off to a VTX with pinio by flashing Emuflight, where it was off by default. Took a while to figure out why there was no power to my VTX.
Is this camera smart enough to finish saving the recording before powering off? If not we could use a logical switch in OpenTX to delay powering off (folks using a DJI or Flysky radio are out of luck). Also I propose to add an (advanced mode) user interface for PinIO in BF configurator. It is too useful to be hidden within the CLI.
That's awesome - on a related note is there anyway to use the peripheral controls on the DJI controller such as the shoulder buttons, or can we only use the aux switches? Guessing the peripheral controls are not exposed to betaflight, reserved for DJI FPV.
Thanks for the information. I am curious to know what the reliability of this is like. I had everything setup and working. They it just stopped. Osca Liang mentioned problems with reliability what has your experience been long term? Also thank you for diving into various bits covered in this video. Great work!
Great video, but I'm having an issue. Dohe all the steps above and the red light on my naked gopro is always red. the fc im using is blitz mini f7 and i have the yellow wire connected to T3, any help please
Hi Joshua, thank you for the great video and the explanations. My current task for our drone project is to get our SMO 4k Camera to work without using the Betaflight FC controller and after listening to your 20 minutes of explanation the task looks a bit less overwhelming!! Am I getting it right that the ON/OFF and the record pins of the camera are controlled by just high signal for ON and low signal for OFF? Like in my theory it should work by first putting 3.3V continously on the ON/OFF pin, then 3.3V continously on the Record pin as long as I wanna record. In the firsts tests the camera recorded unreadable video and the LED turned red (Solid), which indicates a battery signal(???). Do you have an advice? Update: I guess I figured it out. The blue ON/OFF wire of the camera needs a short impulse of 3.3V to turn the cam on and a long impulse (~2 sec) to turn it off. While the cam is active the yellow Rec wire of the camera first needs a short impulse to start the recording and again a short impulse to stop recording. The only thing that confuses me still is that you could measure constant 3.3V signal on the ON/OFF wire with your multimeter when your aux channel turned it on. My camera turns off after a few seconds when I keep up the High signal. Anyways, thanks again for the great video!
I've a jhemcu f722BT. it has 2 cam Input which can be switched with user 1. unfortunately i made a solder bride from vin to 5v. now the ic labeled 3108 is dead. do you know what part this is? 6legs: 1 goes to cam1 2 goes to cam2 3 gnd 4 goes user 1 pin on the f722 5 goes to the osd vin via 75ohm resistor 6 probably NC i could directly solder 1 cam to the 75ohm resistor and it works, but i like to replace the IC. but for this i need to know what ic it is which is labeled 3108....
I have a fc I bought second hand, my tx3 and rx3 are set to none, how do I put the uart back on them? Any ideas? When I typed that in google it led me here, I guess this has the commands to do it but I need to know the pinout for my chip and which one its not using I guess, and I need to assign that pin a box value I guess?
Thanks for the useful infos Josh, but what about if we would like to switch the VTX on/off without using external device ? Is it possible to use this method ? Thanks
Great info! I'm totally confused as to why those soft serial pins were pre-assigned to motors as well though. Seems like you would have met confusion if you either wanted to use motors 5/6 or the soft serial. Or maybe only an issue if you enable both?
AFAIK, for a VTX, this requires a switchable power output - whereas this video is using switchable signal outputs. That means the FC itself has to support power output switching, since otherwise the power pads are permanently and physically connected to power. That said, FCs with built-in power switching _do_ use the pinio function to assign the User 1 mode to the switchable power output. (JB mentions this briefly at 17:20 as well.)
So I just got the defender 25 with the dji o3 and I have a few dji remote 2 grey controllers so I figured I would just try out the remote 2 pnp option. I’m thinking that may have been a mistake because the way this looks to operate, without a second uart controlling rtx, I can’t shut the unit off via remote and still have rx connectivity…doesn’t the rrx and vrx run through the air unit when it’s configured this way? Should I just add a nano rx and get rid of this sbus wire so I can use my tango 2? I tried to configure the dji remote 2 to turn off vtx, but it killed the vtx permanently until I reloaded the config and cycled power….it’s like the FC couldn’t power the o3 back up without the remote command. And if the o3 is powered down, I get no radio. Is there a way to make it work?
@@JoshuaBardwell yeah…I’m going to add the nano. I really feel like I should have known this was the case before I ordered it, but they could easily add a note to the product page that the pnp option will limit vtx power mode functionality…but I should’ve known lol…
@@JoshuaBardwell Thanks. Got the nano rx installed and kept the sbus from the o3 wired up and the tango 2 works fine. Very easy and clean. Now to tune it. The PIDs on this out of the box seem crazy high.
If the LEDs are programmable then use Betaflight led tab to turn them on and off and change their color. The LED LOW aux mode will turn off all LEDs. If the LEDs are not programmable, the a pit switch and pinio can turn them on and off.
I'm trying this path but running into an issue - when I try to check and see if there's anything assigned already and type get pinio_box or get pinio_config, I'm getting ###ERROR: INVALID NAME### I think I should get a return even if nothing is assigned (255,255,255,255) Does this mean my fc (an older spracing F3 Neo) can't do this?
@@JoshuaBardwell Ah well. Thanks for confirming. And more importantly, thanks for all your work in this space. You are a pretty amazing teacher. As someone who often struggles my way through the technical side of quads, I always know your videos will make it easier to understand. I've learned so much from you. Blows me away you that you directly responded here so quickly. What an awesome human you are!
Hello joshua , need ur help . i have LeD for my drone and its only 2 wire. + and - only . it is possible to make a switch or we must need 3 wire led to make it switch on and off using pinio ?
Great video! I do have one question though: isn’t the GoPro set up so that you have to have the switch to ‘ON’ for about a second, then back to ‘OFF’ to get it to start recording? And same thing to get it to stop?
There is no easy way to do that. In theory you could open your Runcam 5, solder wires to the start/stop button and use a relais connected to a PinIO pad. If your goal is to sync your video to your blackbox recording this wouldn't help much because the Runcam needs a little time before actually starting the recording. It's easier to start the recording manually and then giving the quad a small bump that you will be able to see in the video and in the gyro movement in blackbox.
@@Gosuminer thanks a lot for replying man, yeah I agree with your point ,it's hectic to do this, I opened the cam and learned that inside the switch there are three terminals the middle one is at 0V and to its right and left the terminals are at 1.78V each. If the switch is pressed the 1.78 V pins are brought to 0v so I thought I will assign a button in tx such that at its normal position the blackbox is recording but if I do the above mentioned steps shown in video and assign that when the switch's state is changed the blackbox recording will stop and as soon as I leave the switch it will spring back to its original position making the camera to start recording and the blackbox will start a new log. But as you said if the camera has some inbuilt delay after the button being released then this won't work.
