Beta flight, What is it?

Most people involved in this hobby of ours have heard of BetaFlight, but for those that haven't BetaFlight is an experimental fork of CleanFlight which is optimised for acrobatics and racing. Betaflight is rapidly changing and advancing, as a result, by flashing it to your flight controller you get a cutting edge experience and access to new and developing features. Because it is experimental there are occasionally bugs, these are usually fixed very quickly.

BetaFlight is an experimental fork of CleanFlight

Why Betaflight is awesome

Quick summary of main flight performing features in betaflight:

– Gyro sync (always the most fresh gyro data before the loop starts with minimum delay)

– Overclocked i2c bus to speed up communication with gyro

– Gyro FIR filter preconfigured forthe cleanest gyro traces to the pid controller

– Optimized D calculations and filtering for more derivative precision

– Optimized defaults with main focus on PID1 and PID2 (reduced amount of pid controllers for better overview)

– On F1 targets no need to disable acc anymore to get same performance. Gyro readings get priority when in acro mode.

– Optimized scheduling in tasks to minimize jitter to motors

– Fast PWM support in combination with Oneshot125 (This is usefull when you want fixed refresh rate for ESC's up to 4khz)

– Easy to no tuning. Stock settings for PID1 and PID2 should be very well flyable on most machines. The optimised filters do good job on feeding the cleanest gyro traces to the pid controller loop, which gives better flight experience and easier tuning.

– Cooler motors and ESC's. Better for equipment due to clean filters.

– Quaternion logic for Level modes. More precision, less drift and faster performance!

– Beeper selectable for different events

More reasons why Betaflight is awesome

Aside from improvements to the control system, two recent features have made BetaFlight very popular:

Air Mode – This makes it considerably easier to do acrobatic manouvers. Conventionally below mid throttle the effect of stick movements is gradually listened until at zero throttle they have no effect (and frequently the props are stopped anyway). This is great for landing and slow accurate proximity flying as it prevents stick movement at low throttle causing the quad to move aggressively, however, for acrobatics such as flips and rolls, it is exactly the reverse of what is required, for these, the pilot chops the throttle when inverted so the quad is not driving its self into the ground at full throttle, however he wants the quad to manoeuvre aggressively to complete its flip or roll. Air mode addresses this with full impact of stick movement being applied even at zero throttle (the quad should have its props spinning even at zero throttle – something not all pilots currently do and takes a little getting used to). The net result is the quad can flip and roll quickly with the minimum loss of altitude.

ESC Pass through Flashing – BetaFlight and recent releases of CleanFight allow the pass through flashing of ESCS using the USB connection to the Flight controller, removing the requirement to use flashing tools and disassemble the quad to update the ESC firmware.

**WARNING** Betaflight is exactly as the name suggests, BETA software. This means that it is experimental. We do not recommend that beginners to the hobby flash Betaflight. We recommend that newcomers stick with Baseflight or cleanflight.

BETA FLIGHT IS FOR EXPERTS ONLY

How to flash the flight controller with BetaFlight (A Step by Step guide)

This is a step by step guide to flashing your flight controller with BetaFlight including the new Air mode, followed by pass through flashing of BLHeli ESCs.

Details of BetaFlight can be found at the link below, note that this is a very busy thread:

http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2464844

In this blog entry we will go through a step by step flash of BetaFlight followed by a BLHeli Firmware Flash. The examples used are based on a Sparrow Racing 270mm frame with a Naze32 rev6a acro flight controller, an OSDoge, a FrSky X4Rsb and FVT Littlebee 20a ESCs, other components are irrelevant to the steps shown.

Although the configuration used has Arm and Air Mode on separate switch settings it is possible to activate air mode before take-off as Air mode will not take effect even though enabled until a short delay after the quad receives input on both the throttle and Pitch/roll.

In the interest of safety Props should be removed from the quad during the entire process.

In order to flash your flight controller with