Radios

About running a model on a different Tx - an example....  Tony has had a FrSky Horus for ages.  Lots of experience in setting up models on OpenTx. He is just-about-to-fly the printed paper airplane which I also have in progress. I want to learn from his experience.  If I can look at how he has setup his model he becomes an ever better mentor even though he is tens of thousands of Km away.

Three steps forward, one step back.

With battery charged I started up the new FrSky, basic interface looked kind of like what I was expecting but seemed missing stuff.  Turns out that it is a really good idea to populate and SD card with the stuff from the internet - e.g. scripts, sounds, etc.

I finally found the combination of hopping on my left foot to bind the 6ch Rx.  Encouraging noises.

I tried creating a new model in the Companion  - a Delta and before doing much with it I tried to export it to the FrSKy. Something rather garbled showed up in FrSky - garbled name and other attributes.  I found the Companion on my Mac and the OpenTX version did match.  Perhaps it was because I didn't have the SD card in?  Or the OSX version is weird?

With the SD card in I created a new model and I chose the Delta and answered the same questions as in Companion.  It put motor on CH1, rudder on CH4
Left elvaon on CH3 and Right elevon on CH2.

I powered the model down and plugged in the servos.  They move, just not in the way I hoped.  
The 'rudder' on CH4 needed to be reversed - I went to outputs tab and INV direction and that is fine now.  
If I use the right stick with a left right motion I get pitch-up or down.  
Right stick pitch motion gets me a servo roll.

I tried INV output for the 2nd and 3rd channels but pitch and roll stick actions result in roll and pitch.  
I tried swopping the servo leads between 2nd and 3rd slots on the Rx.  That didn't help.

Here is the inputs screen

 

Here is the mixing screen

 

Any suggestions?

God, there's no chance for me then with FRSKY  radio if you find it difficult    i struggle turning a computer on 

Ah, but the option is for me to bash into the long grass, find where the holes are and write down a workflow that avoids them.

 

The FrSky came with an OpenTx Version that is the most recent (which is some years old now) so I did not have to flash anything.

Regarding Elevon setup I found a useful site:  doc.open-tx.org/manual-for-opentx-2-2/mo...xamples/basic-elevon which covers a range of OpenTx topics:

 

And what the OpenTx wizard in the FrSky suggested:

 

The opentx.org suggested Elevon setup has aligned the stick movement with the elevon action. Quite why is not year clear to me.  The wizard used magnitude 50 & -50 while the OpenTx site used magnitude 100 & -100. More negatives in the OpenTx site suggestions.  No doubt it will become clearer as I look into it more.

I still have to put rates and expo in on the INPUTS tab. 

Tony sent me a .bin file which has his model in it but I have yet to figure out how to investigate its contents.  Again, probably really simple to do once one knows the workflow...

 

There is a servo monitor.  It is just taking me a bit to imagine those bars against the strange movements of the physical elevons.  

The rudder setup was perfectly understandable, adding expo on Inputs and inverting the output was clear.

Interesting that the wizard in the FrSky decided to go with Throttle, Elev, Ail, Rud.  It wasn't my choice.  On the Futaba I always had throttle on Ch3
and Run on 4.  

I would like to get communication between the Companion and the box sorted - that mangled upload has me skittish....

Hmmm easy aint it  

Im pleased you have brought all this up Jon as i think im going to struggle if i get FRSKY, took me all my time to get around the Futaba 14 s i had and it took me a long time 
Iv never been any good at studying, hated school from the minute my dad literally dragged me to school, i was grabbing hold of everything i could, one of the best days of my life was when i left school, they also in the early days there changed me from being left handed to right hand and i dont think that helped me, i now do things with both hands, like cricket used to bowl with my right arm and i throw with my left arm, on a computer if i can manage to turn it on after half an hour iv had enough or if something go's wrong i just switch it off peed off with it
But i can see thing in my head that a lot of people cannot like our villa in Cyprus it was just a house on a rock patch of land and when we first saw it Ann said no way she would live there, by 3 o-clock the next morning i had the design all drawn up and we lived there happily until she died
I always told my boys there is an easy way of doing thing and there is a hard way just think it out
But that radio looks terrifying

Yes Elevon's is what I selected.  And yes there are lots of videos.  Spoilt for choice there. I have been making notes and collecting links and that has eaten time.

I thought Futaba when over the top with a 166p manual but FrSky decision to not really have a manual is the flip side.  So lots of other groups have tried to fill that vacuum. Again somewhat spoilt for choice and thus quite a few hours spent wandering around the Web.

While I think I might rather like OpenTx what I have noticed thus far is: 

A) the missed opportunities (they might exist but I have not yet found them) is that OpenTx and derivatives have been around for a decade and so lots of folks will have worked out ways to define almost any physical combination of RC model within the syntax provided by OpenTx.  In other communities there would be a lively market / repository of such goodies.  There would be simple workflows to share models, and makers of RC kits would provide links to download relevant scripts and/or model files. 

the dearth of scripts for the initial creation of models.  Case in point - I had to choose elevon because a flying wing wasn't a choice. There are far more basic RC topologies than I have fingers and toes and yet after a decade there are so few options out-of-the-box. Of course some folk will like starting from scratch and there are times when 'I just bought a Bixler 2 and I want to load up an initial OpenTx description of that beastie and go and explore. Of course some Tx don't support Expo and some that do.  OpenTx knows what box it is running on so why not offer choices - would you like that Delta wing setup with dual rates and an initial Expo that you can fine tune? 

C) Exchanging models - I found a video talking about how viewers shared their models for debug. It seemed to be 'make a backup of all your Tx models, delete all the models except the one that you are having a problem with and send the backup file.  Talk about grit in the system.

D) The 'simulation'  shows bars for each channel.  Fair enough, certainly a better preview than I was getting on Futaba. However, the 'Companion' knows quite a bit about the nature of the RC model so why hasn't someone added some basic graphic feedback showing the movement of control surfaces?

I have been doing computer code for decades usually involving creating a syntax to describe physical objects e.g. a language with rules and syntax that can be understood and acted upon in the computer. OpenTx is, down-deep, nothing more than a basic syntax and rules to describe inputs from the Tx, mixes to transform signals and outputs that are seen in the Rx.  Yet the directives describing the physical model, Tx and Rx are held (as far as I can tell) in files that are not human readable. In most other communities there would be something that emerges as a neutral file format (that pretended to be somewhat human readable), for exchanging information (to support that community market). One might be out there that I have yet to find.  Seems like the 'Companion' would be the perfect host for such exchanges.  It clearly knows how to gather information from the non-human-readable model files. To then spit out even a tabular list of what it knows about would be so much better than capturing a dozen screen shots.