Need Help: Lost Model Alarm on a Switch for Vortex 180

Duck

Active member
I had the misfortune of losing my Vortex 150 at my local park in the tall grass. The lost model alarm had worked up until that point but seemed to start/stop when I didn't expect it. Some landings it went off immediately, some after a few seconds and some never. I didn't think much of it until I was searching the grass for hours for my very small mostly black quad. I gave up hope on recovery and replaced it with a Vortex 180 as it was on sale, white which hopefully is a little easier to see and I was a little more comfortable flying something larger then an Inductrix. Before I take it back to the very same park to fly at high speed over the grass I wanted to better understand the lost model feature. I had been recommended to look at Betaflight Configurator but it isn't obvious what setting might control it. Most mentions of the 'Beeper' feature reference the ESC beepers. I had assumed the Vortex had a dedicated beeper so I wasn't sure it would do the right thing. I tried setting it to channel six anyway to see but none of the switches on my DX6i had an effect (tried both flaps and gear).

Can someone point me at the right resource?

Thanks!
 

ElectriSean

Eternal Student
Mentor
The beeper settings in the configuration tab use DSHOT commands - these are the ESC beepers. To set up your older style piezo buzzer, you have to set up the beeper mode in the modes tab. In the receiver tab you can see which switch controls which aux channel. There is a separate beacon you can set up in BLHeli to go off after a certain amount of inactivity as well.
 

Duck

Active member
@ElectriSean Thanks for the help. I was able to make it work with a couple of extra bits of information. I wound up binding it to my Flaps channel on my DX6i.

* Betaflight by default lists aux 1-2 as the channel where flaps/gear have effect. I had incorrectly assumed Aux 5-6 were the right channels because those were the channel numbers on my receiver.
* I had to setup my flaps channel on my model in the DX6i interface to transmit a value other then 1500 which is 'midpoint'. Using the 'monitor' feature on my tx I was able to tell that I wasn't actually changing the transmitted value when flipping the switch. It is a little strange the default isn't 100% but sure :)
* My quad (the vortex 180) actually takes a long time before betaflight will connect, like 40 seconds. Before then all connection attempts will fail. I didn't recognize this at first and was mistaken that my transmitter being powered was preventing connection from betaflight. @ElectriSean's guidance on the receiver tab helped me identify that this _should_ work and that what I had changed (how long I waited before pressing connect) was impacting my ability to change settings.

I was able to look at the screenshots in oscarliang's article to narrow down what might be wrong in my setup:
https://oscarliang.com/betaflight-firmware-setup/
 

ElectriSean

Eternal Student
Mentor
Glad you got it figured out :) Betaflights channel naming scheme can be a little confusing at first. Like most of it's quirks it makes sense after you figure it out, but it's not always easy to get there ;)