This is a video for those of you out there who are struggling right now to get your ExpressLRS SPI-based tiny whoop like the Mobital 6, the Mobula 7 1S, or a variety of happy model whoops out there right now that you try to bind it to your ExpressLRS radio or module and it just won't bind. I'm here to try to help you out with that. Now this video is assuming that you've gone to Dataflight.
You've gone to the receiver tab, you've pressed bind receiver, you've put your radio into bind mode or your module into bind mode, and you've got nothing. It also assumes that you have either read the notification here about generating a bind phrase. So if you have a bind phrase on your radio, you've entered it in here, and then you've copied this into the CLI, and it's still not binding. So assuming you have followed all of the steps on the ExpressLRS documentation, I've got a link down there below, you've set your rate index correctly, if you're running 500 Hz, 250 Hz, whatever.
Assuming you've done all of this, and it's still not working, here's where I think the problem might be. And as the ExpressLRS documentation states, the SPI receivers always work with the ExpressLRS firmware of the same major versions. That means ELRS 1.0 and 2.0.
need different flight controller firmware. So if you have 2.0 on your drone, if you're running or 4.341 stock Betaflight firmware, it's running 2.0 and your radio was shipped with the latest stable ExpressLRS 3.0, which has been out for a while, you should check and know what version your radio or module is on. So to do that, you go into the ExpressLRS menu from the setup. Go to Wi-Fi connectivity and turn on enable Wi-Fi. And from there, you'll see ExpressLRS TX in the Wi-Fi networks.
The password is going to be ExpressLRS. And in your browser bar, you're going to type HTTP colon slash slash This will lead you to your radio's ExpressLRS update. update and information page.
It'll tell you what firmware revision you have on it. Now on my particular radio, I haven't gone to 3.0 yet. I am still on version so I can bind to all of these. But if I was on version 3, then I wouldn't be able to without this next step that I'm going to show you how I would fix it. To fix this problem, we are going to flash a custom special version of Betaflight 4.3.1.
While we're here, I want to point out that this method will only work for the Crazy Bee F4SX1280 target. If that is not your detected target, when you click the auto detect button, then stop right here. You can't do that.
I don't want you to accidentally flash the wrong firmware. That is for this specific target only. The Happy Model website has a custom version of 4.3.1. So I've put a link to this firmware down in the video description below. So you can download it, get it on your computer, put it somewhere because you're going to use that and flash it to your quad.
So that way you can bring the ExpressLRS SPI up to 3.0. That way your whoop will talk to your radio. This is not scary and it should work without a hitch. So let's go through this step-by-step of updating your TinyWhoop so it can bind to ExpressLRS 3.0. We're going to plug this in.
We're going to go to the CLI, okay? We're going to type diff all in the command line at the bottom there. This is a backup of the configuration of this drone, okay?
You need to do this so that way you don't wipe out. your stock configuration because we're going to flash the firmware and then we need to restore this. So after we type diff all, I'm going to click save to file. We're going to save this to the desktop.
That way it's easy. We can get right to it. Okay, we've got our backup. Now we're going to update firmware.
The drone will do that. We're going to make sure our target is crazy BF4SX1280. Instead of Load Firmware Online, what we're going to do is we're going to go to Load Firmware Local. We're going to go to the desktop, and then we're going to choose that Betaflight 4.3.1 firmware that we downloaded from Happy Model. We're going to do Full Chip Erase, which is always a good idea, and we're going to click Flash Firmware.
And it should go into this process where it erases what's on the board and flashes the firmware. Now, if you can't get this flashing process to work, because maybe you've never flashed Betaflight before on a Windows PC, and you might get an error about DFU and unable to open communication port, jump on over to ImpulseRC.com and go to the download section. and download the ImpulseRC driver fixer tool.
Again, if you've never flashed any firmware on Betaflight before, this might be your first time doing this, you will need this tool to fix the drivers so that way it will flash successfully. And once it does flash, you'll have programming successful and we can connect to the drone. You'll get this warning here that, oh, there's no motor output, all this stuff.
Please fix this problem. We're going to click close. We're going to ignore that.
It doesn't matter. Go to the CLI tab, click load from file. And we went back to the desktop. We're going to click Betaflight CLI Mobile 7 1S. And we're going to click execute.
This is a backup. It will work perfect. It's just a drop-in replacement.
Should be no issue at all. Now when you go to the receiver tab and you click bind receiver or you follow the instructions on the ExpressLRS website to bind with a binding phrase using their generator, you should now be able to bind to the drone. All right, so that's it. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. I hope that if you were having trouble binding to one of these that you were able to get that fixed.
I think this is a lot easier than... thinking about downgrading your radio to ExpressLRS2 just so you can get these things bound, you want to try to stay on 3.0, and this is an absolutely viable solution that works. If you guys need any help, let me know down in the comments below, and I'll try to assist. All right, you guys have a great day. I hope it helped you if you were struggling with this.
And you guys take care.