Toughtilt T copter, servo or motors?? I want both! Help!

[Sam Wickham]

This is driving me mad.
I hope someone here can help me.
I am trying to set up a Tcopter (Simplecopters style)
I am using an Spf3 fc board
A Tough tilt
Es3154 digital emax servo
Sbus (taranis)

What is annoying me most is that I had it flying earlier today!?
I went to do some pid tuning, and when I tried to fly it again, I had lost connection to the receiver (again).

I have tried cleanflight, betaflight (which worked briefly) and the new triflight through betaflight (which doesn't seem to let me reverse the servo direction?! )

Some versions of betaflight allow the servo to work on ch7 but there are no inputs in the receiver tab.

Other versions allow the receiver to set up fine, all motors working, but no servo action on any of the remaining output channels..

I am going round in circles..

Can anyone give me advice?
Has anyone got a working tricopter on betaflight?
Or better still a cli dump to get me started..

Thank you for your time.
Sam.

 

[Montiey]

I run Cleanflight on my Tricopter, but… UGH. You have to do some CLI commands to get the servo mixing working, and honestly? I'm not even sure what I did to get it working in the first place!

Use TriFlight. It's the only firmware that will give you a copter worth your effort, from what I understand. According to the TriFlight Github page, TriFlight will be re-based from Cleanflight to Betaflight. I'm not sure exactly when that will happen, but It's good to know it's being heavily developed.

 

[LitterBug]

Triflight 0.7 and above is based ot BetaFlight 3.1.7. I have four tris. Two Baby Tricopters with the RCExplorer F3FC racing FC, and two larger tris with AirDTF DTFc flight controllers. Since you have a different FC, my diffs from those will not work on your FC. (use diff rather than dump for BF 3.1 and higher) I do have an SPR F3 that I can use to help with the resource mapping. It's currently in a quad, but I can do a proof of concept mapping on mine and then feed those results to you. The first thing we need to determine is what motor channel you have your motors and servo connected to. Ie my F3FC outputs are 1= tail motor, 2=servo, 3 = right front, 4= Left front.

Cheers!
LitterBug

 

[Sam Wickham]

Thanks again for your time!
I tried the latest Triflight through Betaflight, as that is what I originally wanted to use. And everything was going well until it came to my servo direction. I couldn't find any way of reversing it properly.
I found a bit of cli code that reversed the yaw movement when moving the stick, but triflight then seemed to get confused and erratic with giro movement and throttle changes.
From what I can see triflight does quite a few things that should make the Tcopter fly better.
Have I just got the wrong servo?
And I had the motors on ch 1,2 and 3 and the servo on 7 i think..

 

[LitterBug]

Can you post a CLI "diff" of your current config? Also curious to know what CLI config you did to reverse the servo. Was it SMIX to change the Min and Max?

Cheers!
LitterBug

 

[Montiey]

There are separate commands for reversing gyro and stick input to the yaw servo.
What do you mean by the wrong servo? You don't need a special servo to make it work, it just needs the proper configuration.

 

[Sam Wickham]

Ok, I'll load it up with triflight again, get as close as possible and let you have a look. What is the difference between a diff and a dump? Haha. And how do I do it?

 

[Sam Wickham]

Oh and it was smix reverse 5 2 r that I used that seemed to work on betaflight but not triflight..

 

[LitterBug]

Diff only lists parameters that are not set to default. MUCH smaller list.
DUMP lists EVERY SINGLE PARAMETER and is quite large.

Generally speaking, we only care about the parameters that have been changed and don't want to look through all the junk that makes no difference or hasn't been changed.

 

[Sam Wickham]

Got it.
So, this is where i am at the moment.
the servo is working backwards, for stick and giro.
It only comes on when armed (i finally worked out) but at least It seems I have things plugged into the right channels.
It also goes a bit jittery and mental at certain stick movements, but that could be air mode, just winding up on the bench?
I could turn it off for now?

# diff
# Triflight 0.7 Beta 2 / SPRACINGF3 3.1.7 Jun 4 2017 / 13:44:00 (1698ba5)
name Tough T
servo 5 1000 2000 1562 40 40 100 -1

feature -RX_PPM
feature -CURRENT_METER
feature -BLACKBOX
feature -TRANSPONDER
feature RX_SERIAL
feature AIRMODE
map TAER1234
serial 1 32 115200 57600 0 115200
serial 2 64 115200 57600 0 115200
aux 0 0 1 1300 1700
aux 1 13 3 1800 2100
aux 2 31 2 1300 1700
set serialrx_provider = SBUS
set align_board_yaw = 270
profile 0

rateprofile 0
rateprofile 0


#

 

[Sam Wickham]

There are separate commands for reversing gyro and stick input to the yaw servo.
What do you mean by the wrong servo? You don't need a special servo to make it work, it just needs the proper configuration.

Any ideas what commands i should use to reverse the servo properly? So that triflight can still work its magic?
Cheers.