Betaflight 4.5 GPS Rescue Setup and Testing

now is it turning the correct direction no it is flying the wrong direction and it's going to crash I Take Back [Applause] Control oh that worked really well I was upside down when I triggered it that time oh boy and boom how about that that worked real freaking good betaflight 4.5 brings a lot of bug fixes and feature improvements and today we're going to look at one of the most exciting things betaflight 4.5 did fix and improve the GPS rescue return to home function in beta flight it hasn't been very good it's better now you but you got to set it up right that's what we're doing we're going to set it up and we're going to see how it works I'm Joshua Bardwell and you're going to learn something today and you might think that getting GPS rescue working with betaflight 4.5 is as simple as putting a GPS on the quadcopter configuring the flight controller to recognize it and then just you're good to go right but it's not because betaflight is focused on Acro performance betaf flight is not focused first and foremost on autonomous flight with betaf flight there are some steps you need to take to configure GPS rescue correctly and if you don't do this when you activate GPS rescue your quad could just fall out of the sky has that happened to you in the past and the steps that we're going to be working through are on this page of the betaflight website it's linked in the video description below and the first thing we need to do is configure the flight controller to recognize the GPS in the first place I guess the first thing to do is to connect the GPS to the flight controller but connecting the GPS to the flight controller is no different than any other Ur based peripheral the GPS is going to have a TX and an RX wire coming off of it and they're going to go to an RX and a TX wire don't forget to cross them over TX to RX and RX to TX on the flight controller if the GPS has a built-in Compass it will also have an SDA and wire and those will go to the SDA and pad on the flight controller SDA and do not cross over SDA goes to SDA and goes to be aware that not all flight controllers are going to have an SDA and Pad so if yours doesn't you won't be able to use the compass on your GPS but it turns out that's not actually as big a deal as you think the compass data is often pretty noisy and often isn't that usable anyway and betaflight will work without it finally you're going to need to power the GPS most GPS's will take either 5 volts or 3.3 volts and if you have the chance to do it it you should power the GPS from a pad that gets power when you plug USB in my Quadcopter isn't actually set up that way when I plug in USB my GPS doesn't power up and the problem with that is that the GPS then has to search for satellites while the video transmitter is blasting in its ear and it makes it slower to get sat lock and you lock fewer satellites um ideally you'll find a 5vt pad on your flight controller that gets power from USB sometimes it'll be labeled 4v5 that's a dead giveaway or if you have a 3.3 volt pad and if your GPS is rated to take 3.3 volts you power it from the 3.3 volt pad which always gets power from USB once you have the GPS wired to the flight controller the next thing we're going to do is go into the ports Tab and on the peripherals column we're going to set GPS for whichever uart number we soldered the or plugged the GPS into we're going to leave B at Auto and then in betaf Flight 4.5 the GPS settings have moved from the configuration tab to oh my God the GPS tab what a strange place to put them kind of like that's where they should have been in the first place and the settings we're going to choose are U blocks betaflight 4.5 has extremely limited actually they may have removed it entirely they may have removed support for nmea GPS's I'm not sure about that but you're going to want to use U blocks and basically all modern GPS's support U blocks uh and you're going to set auto bod and auto config and most of the time this means that the GPS s will start working you're going to know it starts working when you see a yellow or red GPS icon at the top of the betaf flight configurator yellow means that you have GPS lock red means that the GPS is talking to the flight controller but you don't have GPS lock yet probably cuz you're indoors now when you look at my Quadcopter configuration you're going to notice that the B rate has been manually set to 1152 if you know what B rate your GPS is set to use you can manually set it and if Auto bod doesn't work and sometimes it doesn't work you can try manually setting B rates between about 9600 and 115 200 K uh K bod uh but Mo hopefully most of the time Auto will work and you won't have to go through that nonsense you're going to notice in my configuration that I have the use Galileo option enabled as well Galileo is a technology that can improve uh the positioning and I don't see any reason to have it turned off maybe somebody out there who knows more about GPS assisted flight than me knows why it's off by default I always turn it on and there's also ground assistance type which is another technology that under some conditions will improve your positional accuracy and I always turn it on as well because I figure why not give myself all the help I can get finally you're going to need to set the set home Point once option and this is you're going to want to give some thought to this you see the way that betaflight works by default is the set home Point once option is off what that means is that every time you disarm and rearm your qu quadopter a new home point will be set and every time you GPS rescue you will return to the last place that you armed the quadcopter can you see a problem with this if for some reason you were to disarm your quadcopter and rearm it somewhere that wasn't a valid home point the quad would try to fly to that location and it would literally never fly home again if you're sure that you will always want the quadcopter to return to the last place it armed then you should leave this option off but some people would prefer to do set home Point once and what that means is the very first time you arm that's the that's the home point and will be the home point until you power cycle the quad if you do this option though make sure that at the time you set the home point you have a good number of STS locked and everything is like you have good good positioning accuracy because if you have bad positioning accuracy then your home Point won't be as precise okay so now you've got a working GPS you've got a red or yellow icon at the top of the betaflight configurator and you are ready to begin actually configuring it to work correctly and according to the website the first thing we need to do is make sure that our auto level is flat when you go into GPS rescue mode the very first thing betaflight does is try to auto level the quad as if you had put it into angle mode and if the accelerometer is not calibrated correctly it'll be cocked off to one side and GPS rescue well eventually presumably GPS positioning will detect that you're drifting and try to correct for it but it's better if you start from a solid foundation of a flat and level auto level so we're going to go into the setup Tab and we're going to put the quadcopter flat and level on the table and we're going to click calibrate and then I'm going to plug my Quadcopter in I'm going to arm it and I'm going to do a test hover but the way my Quadcopter is set up is it will not arm until it gets a GPS lock so if you try to arm and yours won't arm that's probably why that's an option we can change later if we decide to and I'll show you where later in the video so I'm going to take off and I'm going to switch to angle mode and we're in angle mode yes how am I doing a little drift a little bit of drift now angle mode is always going to have a little bit of drift there's no such thing as a perfect hover in angle mode that's because the CG of the quadcopter is not perfectly centered and there's always going to be a little bit of wind and so forth so if there's a tiny amount of drift don't stress your yourself out trying to fix it but as long as it's mostly hovering flat and level you're good to go on to the next step and the next step is figuring out what your hover throttle position is and it's going to be easy we're just going to hover it and we're going to look at our hover throttle position but be aware like the battery that you've got on there if you've got a GoPro or if you don't have a GoPro all of that is going to affect your hover throttle position so you're going to want to think about it because if the quad is super heavy and you use that hover throttle position then later if you GPS rescue and the quad is lighter like you're you're running without your camera then it's going to tend to climb or if the quad is super light like you do a test flight with no camera and a tiny battery then your hover position is going to be too low and when you go into GPS rescue the quad is going to tend to descend again it just needs to be in the ballpark of correct because once the GPS system kicks in it's going to detect your altitude and your position and it's going to adjust for that but we want it to be pretty much in the ballpark of correct so set your quadcopter up pretty close to the Flying weight that you're going to expect it to be in when you activate GPS rescue now I've got if you look in the lower right hand corner of the screen I've got my throttle position there it's just above the on Min timer it's currently at zero and what I'm going to do is very simply take off and try to find an approximate hover where I'm neither climbing nor descending ah it looks like I'm hovering at about 23% throttle the next step is that we need to set the stage one fails safe throttle value to this hover value and the reason we need to do this is that when we first fail safe GPS rescue won't kick in immediately there is a small window of time called stage one fail safe where betaflight waits to see if the signal is going to come back the idea is that if there's a very short interruption in your signal we want you to just keep flying we don't want the quadcopter to freak out and assume everything is gone to hell so the default behavior for beta flight is that when you go into stage one fail safe the throttle goes too low it goes all the way down and the idea is that if you're not in control we don't want the quadcopter to be like doing anything crazy and if you get signal back before you crash you can the throttle will come back up and you can keep flying but that's a problem because like let's say we're flying out over the ocean and we want GPS rescued to save us and then we we fail safe and in that stage one fail safe window before GPS rescue kicks in quadcopter goes into the ocean so we want the throttle to default to a value that will cause the quadcopter to slightly begin climbing before GPS rescue kicks in the next thing we need to do is set the GPS rescue throttle value and this is the throttle value that will apply once GPS rescue kicks in and you might think well why does it need to know that well can't it it just tell whether the quad is climbing or descending and adjust the throttle based on that and the answer is yes but again it helps if it has a good starting point to work from as opposed to having to kind of just continue the GPS data is is not update that frequently it's like 10 times per second and the barometer is kind of noisy and it just helps if you have a really solid starting point for the throttle we were at 22 or 23% hover if we want to climb slightly maybe we'll add like five % to that we'll test it we'll see if that's a good good value so that would be 27% the throttle goes from 1,000 to 2,000 so the math is actually not that hard it's going to be 1,270 would be 27% right 2000 it's one 1270 so for the GPS hover throttle we're going to set it to the actual hover value which was 1230 and Save and reboot now the next thing I see on this website is that the recommended B rate for the GPS is 57,600 kilobot and you may remember that I'm at 1152 the problem is that faster bit rates are more susceptible to uh corruption from electrical noise so you want to use a b rate that is fast enough for your GPS update frequency but no faster betaflight will by default try to set your GPS to the fastest update rate that it supports so if you're running 57600 you should be good to go that will get you a 10 HZ update rate which is the recommended value if you have an M10 GPS they can actually do 20 htz and that would require 115200 bod uh but that's betaflight the web page says oh untested test carefully so there may be reasons why you might not want to do that if you do decide that you want to change the B rate you're going to need to download a tool called enter which is a software a piece of software that adjusts the settings in your GPS Yes actually I'm not sure that's true because betaflight autoc configures the GPS I should be able to just change the B rate and have it work right okay I got to know we're going to go to the ports Tab and uh we're going to change the B rate to like 57600 and we're going to save and reboot the other thing you need to know is that for betaf flight to automatically configure the GPS the GPS has to be powered up at the same time as the flight controller so what I'm doing here the flight controller is on USB but the GPS is powered down that's not going to work instead what I'm going to do is I'm going to unplug USB and I'm going to plug in the battery and then I'm going to plug in USB and we're going to see if the GPS is talking to the flight controller at all holy cow it is okay so this is working as expected that's amazing you shouldn't need to download enter and manually change the settings of the GPS betaf flight is just doing it for you which is one of the beautiful new features of 4.5 that was having problems in 4.4 amazing well I guess we'll set it to 57600 as the devs recommend since this I don't think this is an M10 GPS I'm not actually sure maybe it is maybe it isn't doesn't matter they recommend 57600 that's what we're going to do at this point we've done the minimum amount necessary to do a basic test of GPS rescue but we're not just going to take off and fly into the distance and Trigger GPS rescue how are we going to trigger GPS rescue oh yeah we have to set up a GPS rescue mode here in the modes tab we need to add a GPS rescue mode and we need to set up a switch to trigger that mode if you're playing with GPS rescue and betaf flight I'm going to assume you know how to do that and I'm not I'm going to resist the urge to assume everyone is a total rank beginner and show you how to set up an ox mode if you do need a tutorial on how to set up an ox mode I'll put a link in the video description to my beginner build Series where I take you through a build of a 5-in quad cupture complete from start to finish finish for total total noobs and obviously there's a section in there on how to set up box modes but we are not just going to fly into the distance and activate GPS rescue this is the next reason that GPS rescue fails for some people and again I'm not trying to blame you GPS rescue has been legitimately janky in the past and it could still fail even when you did everything right but a lot of times people just didn't do the basic checks because they just didn't know they just expected it to work and then it failed and so we're going to do some basic checks and those checks are well number one ensure the firmware is built with GPS support yeah betaf flight 4.4 introduced a new way of flashing the flight controllers where features could be left out to save space well obviously if you've gotten this far you have GPS support CU otherwise the screens that I'm showing you wouldn't they would be blank or they wouldn't work for you so good to go there we're going to enable GPS and GPS rescue yes we did that in the GPS tab we enabled it check in the configurator that the module gain satellites in position reliably so I'll go ahead and plug the quadcopter in and we'll go to the GPS Tab and we'll see how many satellites we've got locked and we have nine SATs locked already instantly this is not the first time I've powered it up but we're good to go there now at this point we could fly out and test GPS rescue and see how it works and that will be okay as long as we are not using GPS rescue for fail safe we are only manually triggering it uh but before we activate GPS rescue we're just going to do some sanity checks like for example does my direction home Arrow Point home no not even remotely my home direct my home point should be right here and it is pointing the absolute wrong way let's check that again H not disarm okay now if I arm I've got a new home point 0 meters to home direction home is irrelevant cuz I'm right on top of it and if I fly away that Arrow should Point behind me and it totally doesn't my direction home arrow is pointing the absolute opposite direction from the actual direction home if I activate GPS rescue now bad things will happen I have to fix this now normally the reason that this would happen would be if there was a compass on my GPS and the compass orientation was incorrect if the compass was like the compass has an orientation it has to know which direction it's facing relative to the front of the quad and in fact if we look in the betaf flight configuration tab there are magnetometer alignment settings there that can be used to set the mag alignment correctly you don't see those on my screen because my magnetometer is disabled in fact I'm not even sure that this GPS has a magnetometer so I'm actually a little confused right now because like it should know what direction I'm going you see the way that beta flight knows what direction the the quadcopter is facing when it's got a GPS think about it GPS gives position it doesn't give direction if I have a GPS receiver and I turn in a circle nothing changes so how does how does it know what direction we're facing and what direction home is the answer is that there's a parameter called GPS heading basically when you start moving in a given Direction the GPS heading tells you what direction you're moving and in in lie of a compass betaf flight assumes that's also the direction you're facing since most of the time you're flying straightforward if you were you should know that if you were to fly sideways or backwards the direction home Arrow would be completely whacked out because it it that assumption is no longer correct and if you stand in one place and rotate direction home it might like figure it out from the gyro like it's not just relying on the direction home but in general for the direction home Arrow to be accurate you need to be flying in a straight line for a short distance and you'll see that it comes around to the correct value I think I'm going to bite the bullet and try and assume this is a display issue not an issue with the actual aircraft and fingers crossed it doesn't just freak out fun fun fun well great now I don't feel so confident do I so I am going to put the quadcopter somewhere reasonably safe so I'm going to go out here and I'm going to put the quadcopter relatively close to the ground so if it disarms it doesn't damage itself and it's well away from any thing that it might crash into I'm going to activate GPS rescue here we go oh okay we're climbing that's good now is it turning the correct direction no it is flying the wrong direction and it's going to crash I Take Back Control let's try one more time I think oh I see the problem uh it was returning to home at the highest altitude I flew at let's climb to an altitude that is safe to return home at that's my mistake that's user error let's try one more time though close to the ground and GPS rescue climbing to good this is a safe altitude and are we coming home that's better oh and the direction home arrow is sort of pointing the right way okay I'm going to take control before it tries to Autoland because this is a pretty tight environment but it is coming home I'm going to take control that worked pretty well so let's set a new auto Landing Point here in my oh let's set the auto Landing point out in that field that's a great place to Auto Land and I'm going to need to land and disarm and take off again will I succeed at that guess we're going to find oh God no okay good okay new home Point set now we're going to come over here again we're going to make sure we climb to an altitude that clears all the obstacles around us we'll go down here again a safe place where if it disarms I'm not going to uh break anything and I'm safe to punch out and climb and GPS rescue climbing good not quite going straight where you going buddy good altitude and we're heading home now the home arrow is pointing the right way I don't understand what changed uh this is a big open field so despite the fact that I can't see below me I'm I'm going to go ahead and let it descend and see what happens it should Auto Land oh boy and boom how about that that worked real freaking good worked real freaking good dude but we're not done yet you see so far we have only tested the ability to activate GPS rescue manually and what we really want is for GP us rescue to kick in when we fail safe and save us from losing our drone and that's what we're going to do next but before we do that could I remind you I have a patreon patreon is a website where you can subscribe to me for as little as $2 a month or more if you feel like I've earned it just ask yourself if I was heading to work on the subway and Bardwell was sitting there and instead of like playing a guitar and singing a song he was giving out drone advice how much would you throw in my hat if that's $2 a month if it's it's $5 a month if it's $10 a month whatever it is 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you decide you're going to support the next thing we're going to do is we're going to go into the betaf flight modes Tab and instead of GPS rescue we're going to add the failsafe mode and we're going to set that up exactly like GPS rescue was I'm just going to reuse that switch but we're going to delete GPS rescue and what this is going to do is now when I flip that switch it's going to simulate as if a fail safe had occurred some people like to do this by just turning their radios off or yanking the module out of the back of their radio that's pretty risky because if anything goes wrong like it takes you a while to turn the radio back on right by doing this fails safe aux mode we can simulate a fail safe without actually like forcing a real fail safe so we've got the fail safe ax mode set up on that switch and you could set it up on a different switch if you wanted you could have GPS on one switch and fail safe on another switch I just kind of don't feel like doing that um one thing you need to know though is that the failsafe switch needs to be with no other aux modes on that aux Channel it needs to only be failsafe and nothing else then we're going to go to the failsafe Tab and we're going to set the failsafe switch action to trigger stage two failsafe and we're going to set the fail safe Behavior to land the only parameter here we're going to need to change is the throttle value to use while landing and we're going to want to set this to something that slowly descends the idea here is that the quad will sort of automatically descend until well it's just going to disarm and crash so we'll interrupt it before that happens so let's uh we were at 22 23% hover let's set it something like 20% Which is going to be 1200 so we're going to set that to 1,200 and then this parameter delay for turning off the motors's in fail safe let's set that to 10 seconds in real life you wouldn't want to set this to 10 seconds most likely because the quadcopter is out of control it's fail safe and it's just sort of Auto leveling and drifting and you wouldn't want to let it do that for 10 seconds cuz it might the idea here is that the landing will kind of level It Out Slow It Down descend a little bit and then it'll disarm and do the normal fail safe Behavior but since I'm going to be manually triggering fail safe we'll set it to 10 seconds and we'll take our chances I want to be able to take it out of fail safe before it just disarms and crashes itself and what we want to do here is we just want to verify that fail safe initiates Landing mode this is actually how GPS rescue starts working uh before the GPS Behavior actually takes over so I'm going to trigger fail safe now using that same GPS rescue switch that I did no that is wrong that is the wrong switch I'm an idiot now we'll try again yep okay working good it initiated land in and started to descend that is what we want now we go to the next step and the second step is going to be to change this fail stfe switch action to initiate stage one this is important because remember that during stage one fail safe the quadcopter is going to be waiting for Recovery of Link it's going to go to that throttle value that causes it to slowly climb and after a short period of time then it's going to trigger GPS rescue to kick in and now we need to make sure that that is going to work correctly if that's set wrong then there can be a sudden drop that causes the quad to crash or that causes it to disarm and GPS rescue never gets a chance to kick in you also should take a look at this parameter period of time in stage one after signal loss this is how long stage one is going to last before stage 2 GPS rescue ultimately kicks in the default value is 400 milliseconds and you could consider setting that shorter you could consider setting it longer if you set it shorter be aware that brief interruptions in your signal short micro fail saves could theoretically trigger GPS rescue when you don't want it to we're going to leave it at the default of 0.4 for now and what we should see here is that when I initiate the fail safe the quad levels out and starts to climb for 400 milliseconds and then enters Auto Landing where it starts to descend uh that climb may be imp perceptibly short CU 400 milliseconds isn't that long but we definitely don't want to see it descend at all so we will let's start some forward flight here and and we'll trigger it here we go yep it's in Auto Landing that worked pretty well it didn't really drop I'll tell you what let's test it a little more aggressively like what if I'm moving a little more aggressively when it triggers here we're risking a crash but we got to do what we got to do [Applause] do that worked pretty [Applause] well oh that worked really well I was upside down when I triggered it that [Applause] time I was in the middle of a roll when I triggered it that time that's working really freaking well I'm kind of impressed there's only one more step and that's to trigger actual GPS rescue on failsafe we're going to do that here in the failsafe tab we're going to change the failsafe Behavior to GPS rescue definitely take a look at this altitude value because you're going to want to set this based on the flight profile that you expect the default is that the quad will Ascend to the maximum altitude it was at at any time in the flight with the idea being that that will cause it to fly over any obstacles that are between it and the home position this may or may not be the right thing to do though for example if if you knew that you were flying like underneath an obstacle you might prefer that the quad returns home at its current altitude or if you knew you were going to be flying somewhere with just no obstacles out in the middle of the desert there's no point in ascending to some high altitude and flying home when you could just fly home there's also an option to have it return at a fixed altitude if you know for a fact there is a specific altitude you wanted to fly back at think about this because nothing sucks worse than GPS rescue initiating and the quad flying straight into the side of a building or something like that okay so we've set GPS rescue as the fail safe Behavior we're going to save and reboot and at this point we'll go ahead and test it but honestly I think it's going to be pretty drama free we've tested each of the parts individually to confirm that they're working now they should work when they come all together but there's only one way to be sure don't forget to hit save and reboot on that because then you'll take off and expect GPS rescue to work and it won't work like I totally didn't just do so let's not get ahead of ourselves though the first thing we're going to do is we're going to make sure that we had satellites when we took off we had 13 14 STS when we took off we have a good solid home location that's a terrible home location it's my porch okay well I'll take over before that before we crash into my house uh we're going to make sure our direction home arrow is pointing roughly in the correct direction but in order to do that we're going to fly straight we're going to fly straight forward for a little bit to let let it sort of sort itself out cuz I don't have a compass okay and then I'm going to position my quad somewhere where I would be okay if it crashed but it probably isn't because I've done all my checks and we're going to activate GPS rescue or fail save we're climbing that's good rescue in the upper left I see rescue is active we're turning towards home we are flying in the direction of home we are flying in the direction of home I will take over before it descends there we go that's the beginning of The Descent phase and it is roughly over where it wanted to be not freaking bad ah I'm flying I'm having a good time oh no I fail safed oo ah well that uh is the end of the flight testing for this phase of the video but there are still a couple more more things you need to know give me one second there's a setting in beta flight that gives you a much better indicator of the health of your GPS lock than the number of SATs locked which is what we've been using so far and it's called hdop and I don't 100% know what hdop is beyond that it's a measure of the health of your GPS lock but you can get betaflight to show it to you in the OSD and you should totally do that I would have done it earlier in the video except I forgot how to set it up and didn't look it up again until just now here's how you do it what you're going to do is go to the CLI Tab and if we just type get hdop this parameter is that one if I type set OSD GPS unor SATs show hdop I'll just hit the Tab Key to autocomplete set equals on and save so you can see right next to the num SATs there is the hdop value it's currently 1.6 an hdop value around 1.0 or less is supposed to indicate a really good GPS fix my value of 1.6 is I don't know not as good as it could be maybe if I took it out there it would get better I don't know let's see oh God it's even worse 2.0 how bad is that here like a value of one or below gives you an accuracy of about 2.5 M so then presumably an hdop of 2.0 is an accuracy of about 5 m which isn't that good um don't know why my hdop isn't better even though I have 15 stats locked but there you go now you know at this point you have got betaflight GPS rescue just about as reliable as it can be but there are some gotas and I'm going to remind you not to forget them as you go forward don't just think ah I got that betaf flight GPS rescue thing solved and go fly your quadcopter and never think about it again each time you take off make sure that before you take off you have plenty of SATs locked that you have a low hdop and after you take off fly straight in a given direction for a little while and see that the home Arrow points mostly in the correct direction if you have a compass which we haven't touched on at all because a lot of times betaflight GPS rescue doesn't actually benefit from a compass especially on very small quad cters but if you do have a compass make sure that the compass is oriented correctly I've got a SE video where I did that the video is in inav not in betaflight but the process of figuring out if the compass is oriented correctly uh is the same and figuring out you know what values to put in there so I'm going to link that down in the video description below also if you have a compass make sure that you have done a good compass calibration well away from any met metallic or magnetic objects but mostly in betaflight most people are just not going to use a compass and not really know the difference if you're about to do a really critical flight maybe do a test fly where you manually activate GPS rescue or fail safe before you just commit and full send it into the ocean just make sure that everything is good in fact you probably should be testing GPS rescue fairly regularly to make sure like that your GPS hasn't become damaged that your auto level that your angle mode your accelerometer that's the word hasn't gone out of calibration they can go out of calibration just test every little you know once a day when you fly to make sure that it's all working right to know that you can still rely on it and there are a few edge cases where for example if you're flying in a super windy environment the default B beta flight settings may not be able to get you to fight the wind and come home again you should refer to that page linked in the video description for instructions on how to configure some of those parameters to deal with some of those cases the final thing I got to say to you is if your GPS has really poor performance like it just is kind of like all over the place there are some edge cases that can cause that as well and you should look at that page to figure those out but this video is already long enough we're not going to dive into those well I hope you've enjoyed this video about betaflight 4.5 GPS rescue but that is not the only thing that betaflight 4.5 is bringing to the party there are a ton of new features and Bug fixes and changes and I'm going to be going through them there's a playlist on screen right now as well as link down in the video description and the first thing you can do is go check out the first video in that playlist which is my betaflight 4.5 release overview you and see what's coming up I'll put a link to that and a card on screen as well if you want to go straight there I'll see you there

now is it turning the correct direction no it is flying the wrong direction and it&#39;s going to crash I Take Back [Applause] Control oh that worked really well I was upside down when I triggered it that time oh boy and boom how about that that worked real freaking good betaflight 4.5 brings a lot of bug fixes and feature improvements and today we&#39;re going to look at one of the most exciting things betaflight 4.5 did fix and improve the GPS rescue return to home function in beta flight it hasn&#39;t been very good it&#39;s better now you but you got to set it up right that&#39;s what we&#39;re doing we&#39;re going to set it up and we&#39;re going to see how it works I&#39;m Joshua Bardwell and you&#39;re going to learn something today and you might think that getting GPS rescue working with betaflight 4.5 is as simple as putting a GPS on the quadcopter configuring the flight controller to recognize it and then just you&#39;re good to go right but it&#39;s not because betaflight is focused on Acro performance betaf flight is not focused first and foremost on autonomous flight with betaf flight there are some steps you need to take to configure GPS rescue correctly and if you don&#39;t do this when you activate GPS rescue your quad could just fall out of the sky has that happened to you in the past and the steps that we&#39;re going to be working through are on this page of the betaflight website it&#39;s linked in the video description below and the first thing we need to do is configure the flight controller to recognize the GPS in the first place I guess the first thing to do is to connect the GPS to the flight controller but connecting the GPS to the flight controller is no different than any other Ur based peripheral the GPS is going to have a TX and an RX wire coming off of it and they&#39;re going to go to an RX and a TX wire don&#39;t forget to cross them over TX to RX and RX to TX on the flight controller if the GPS has a built-in Compass it will also have an SDA and wire and those will go to the SDA and pad on the flight controller SDA and do not cross over SDA goes to SDA and goes to be aware that not all flight controllers are going to have an SDA and Pad so if yours doesn&#39;t you won&#39;t be able to use the compass on your GPS but it turns out that&#39;s not actually as big a deal as you think the compass data is often pretty noisy and often isn&#39;t that usable anyway and betaflight will work without it finally you&#39;re going to need to power the GPS most GPS&#39;s will take either 5 volts or 3.3 volts and if you have the chance to do it it you should power the GPS from a pad that gets power when you plug USB in my Quadcopter isn&#39;t actually set up that way when I plug in USB my GPS doesn&#39;t power up and the problem with that is that the GPS then has to search for satellites while the video transmitter is blasting in its ear and it makes it slower to get sat lock and you lock fewer satellites um ideally you&#39;ll find a 5vt pad on your flight controller that gets power from USB sometimes it&#39;ll be labeled 4v5 that&#39;s a dead giveaway or if you have a 3.3 volt pad and if your GPS is rated to take 3.3 volts you power it from the 3.3 volt pad which always gets power from USB once you have the GPS wired to the flight controller the next thing we&#39;re going to do is go into the ports Tab and on the peripherals column we&#39;re going to set GPS for whichever uart number we soldered the or plugged the GPS into we&#39;re going to leave B at Auto and then in betaf Flight 4.5 the GPS settings have moved from the configuration tab to oh my God the GPS tab what a strange place to put them kind of like that&#39;s where they should have been in the first place and the settings we&#39;re going to choose are U blocks betaflight 4.5 has extremely limited actually they may have removed it entirely they may have removed support for nmea GPS&#39;s I&#39;m not sure about that but you&#39;re going to want to use U blocks and basically all modern GPS&#39;s support U blocks uh and you&#39;re going to set auto bod and auto config and most of the time this means that the GPS s will start working you&#39;re going to know it starts working when you see a yellow or red GPS icon at the top of the betaf flight configurator yellow means that you have GPS lock red means that the GPS is talking to the flight controller but you don&#39;t have GPS lock yet probably cuz you&#39;re indoors now when you look at my Quadcopter configuration you&#39;re going to notice that the B rate has been manually set to 1152 if you know what B rate your GPS is set to use you can manually set it and if Auto bod doesn&#39;t work and sometimes it doesn&#39;t work you can try manually setting B rates between about 9600 and 115 200 K uh K bod uh but Mo hopefully most of the time Auto will work and you won&#39;t have to go through that nonsense you&#39;re going to notice in my configuration that I have the use Galileo option enabled as well Galileo is a technology that can improve uh the positioning and I don&#39;t see any reason to have it turned off maybe somebody out there who knows more about GPS assisted flight than me knows why it&#39;s off by default I always turn it on and there&#39;s also ground assistance type which is another technology that under some conditions will improve your positional accuracy and I always turn it on as well because I figure why not give myself all the help I can get finally you&#39;re going to need to set the set home Point once option and this is you&#39;re going to want to give some thought to this you see the way that betaflight works by default is the set home Point once option is off what that means is that every time you disarm and rearm your qu quadopter a new home point will be set and every time you GPS rescue you will return to the last place that you armed the quadcopter can you see a problem with this if for some reason you were to disarm your quadcopter and rearm it somewhere that wasn&#39;t a valid home point the quad would try to fly to that location and it would literally never fly home again if you&#39;re sure that you will always want the quadcopter to return to the last place it armed then you should leave this option off but some people would prefer to do set home Point once and what that means is the very first time you arm that&#39;s the that&#39;s the home point and will be the home point until you power cycle the quad if you do this option though make sure that at the time you set the home point you have a good number of STS locked and everything is like you have good good positioning accuracy because if you have bad positioning accuracy then your home Point won&#39;t be as precise okay so now you&#39;ve got a working GPS you&#39;ve got a red or yellow icon at the top of the betaflight configurator and you are ready to begin actually configuring it to work correctly and according to the website the first thing we need to do is make sure that our auto level is flat when you go into GPS rescue mode the very first thing betaflight does is try to auto level the quad as if you had put it into angle mode and if the accelerometer is not calibrated correctly it&#39;ll be cocked off to one side and GPS rescue well eventually presumably GPS positioning will detect that you&#39;re drifting and try to correct for it but it&#39;s better if you start from a solid foundation of a flat and level auto level so we&#39;re going to go into the setup Tab and we&#39;re going to put the quadcopter flat and level on the table and we&#39;re going to click calibrate and then I&#39;m going to plug my Quadcopter in I&#39;m going to arm it and I&#39;m going to do a test hover but the way my Quadcopter is set up is it will not arm until it gets a GPS lock so if you try to arm and yours won&#39;t arm that&#39;s probably why that&#39;s an option we can change later if we decide to and I&#39;ll show you where later in the video so I&#39;m going to take off and I&#39;m going to switch to angle mode and we&#39;re in angle mode yes how am I doing a little drift a little bit of drift now angle mode is always going to have a little bit of drift there&#39;s no such thing as a perfect hover in angle mode that&#39;s because the CG of the quadcopter is not perfectly centered and there&#39;s always going to be a little bit of wind and so forth so if there&#39;s a tiny amount of drift don&#39;t stress your yourself out trying to fix it but as long as it&#39;s mostly hovering flat and level you&#39;re good to go on to the next step and the next step is figuring out what your hover throttle position is and it&#39;s going to be easy we&#39;re just going to hover it and we&#39;re going to look at our hover throttle position but be aware like the battery that you&#39;ve got on there if you&#39;ve got a GoPro or if you don&#39;t have a GoPro all of that is going to affect your hover throttle position so you&#39;re going to want to think about it because if the quad is super heavy and you use that hover throttle position then later if you GPS rescue and the quad is lighter like you&#39;re you&#39;re running without your camera then it&#39;s going to tend to climb or if the quad is super light like you do a test flight with no camera and a tiny battery then your hover position is going to be too low and when you go into GPS rescue the quad is going to tend to descend again it just needs to be in the ballpark of correct because once the GPS system kicks in it&#39;s going to detect your altitude and your position and it&#39;s going to adjust for that but we want it to be pretty much in the ballpark of correct so set your quadcopter up pretty close to the Flying weight that you&#39;re going to expect it to be in when you activate GPS rescue now I&#39;ve got if you look in the lower right hand corner of the screen I&#39;ve got my throttle position there it&#39;s just above the on Min timer it&#39;s currently at zero and what I&#39;m going to do is very simply take off and try to find an approximate hover where I&#39;m neither climbing nor descending ah it looks like I&#39;m hovering at about 23% throttle the next step is that we need to set the stage one fails safe throttle value to this hover value and the reason we need to do this is that when we first fail safe GPS rescue won&#39;t kick in immediately there is a small window of time called stage one fail safe where betaflight waits to see if the signal is going to come back the idea is that if there&#39;s a very short interruption in your signal we want you to just keep flying we don&#39;t want the quadcopter to freak out and assume everything is gone to hell so the default behavior for beta flight is that when you go into stage one fail safe the throttle goes too low it goes all the way down and the idea is that if you&#39;re not in control we don&#39;t want the quadcopter to be like doing anything crazy and if you get signal back before you crash you can the throttle will come back up and you can keep flying but that&#39;s a problem because like let&#39;s say we&#39;re flying out over the ocean and we want GPS rescued to save us and then we we fail safe and in that stage one fail safe window before GPS rescue kicks in quadcopter goes into the ocean so we want the throttle to default to a value that will cause the quadcopter to slightly begin climbing before GPS rescue kicks in the next thing we need to do is set the GPS rescue throttle value and this is the throttle value that will apply once GPS rescue kicks in and you might think well why does it need to know that well can&#39;t it it just tell whether the quad is climbing or descending and adjust the throttle based on that and the answer is yes but again it helps if it has a good starting point to work from as opposed to having to kind of just continue the GPS data is is not update that frequently it&#39;s like 10 times per second and the barometer is kind of noisy and it just helps if you have a really solid starting point for the throttle we were at 22 or 23% hover if we want to climb slightly maybe we&#39;ll add like five % to that we&#39;ll test it we&#39;ll see if that&#39;s a good good value so that would be 27% the throttle goes from 1,000 to 2,000 so the math is actually not that hard it&#39;s going to be 1,270 would be 27% right 2000 it&#39;s one 1270 so for the GPS hover throttle we&#39;re going to set it to the actual hover value which was 1230 and Save and reboot now the next thing I see on this website is that the recommended B rate for the GPS is 57,600 kilobot and you may remember that I&#39;m at 1152 the problem is that faster bit rates are more susceptible to uh corruption from electrical noise so you want to use a b rate that is fast enough for your GPS update frequency but no faster betaflight will by default try to set your GPS to the fastest update rate that it supports so if you&#39;re running 57600 you should be good to go that will get you a 10 HZ update rate which is the recommended value if you have an M10 GPS they can actually do 20 htz and that would require 115200 bod uh but that&#39;s betaflight the web page says oh untested test carefully so there may be reasons why you might not want to do that if you do decide that you want to change the B rate you&#39;re going to need to download a tool called enter which is a software a piece of software that adjusts the settings in your GPS Yes actually I&#39;m not sure that&#39;s true because betaflight autoc configures the GPS I should be able to just change the B rate and have it work right okay I got to know we&#39;re going to go to the ports Tab and uh we&#39;re going to change the B rate to like 57600 and we&#39;re going to save and reboot the other thing you need to know is that for betaf flight to automatically configure the GPS the GPS has to be powered up at the same time as the flight controller so what I&#39;m doing here the flight controller is on USB but the GPS is powered down that&#39;s not going to work instead what I&#39;m going to do is I&#39;m going to unplug USB and I&#39;m going to plug in the battery and then I&#39;m going to plug in USB and we&#39;re going to see if the GPS is talking to the flight controller at all holy cow it is okay so this is working as expected that&#39;s amazing you shouldn&#39;t need to download enter and manually change the settings of the GPS betaf flight is just doing it for you which is one of the beautiful new features of 4.5 that was having problems in 4.4 amazing well I guess we&#39;ll set it to 57600 as the devs recommend since this I don&#39;t think this is an M10 GPS I&#39;m not actually sure maybe it is maybe it isn&#39;t doesn&#39;t matter they recommend 57600 that&#39;s what we&#39;re going to do at this point we&#39;ve done the minimum amount necessary to do a basic test of GPS rescue but we&#39;re not just going to take off and fly into the distance and Trigger GPS rescue how are we going to trigger GPS rescue oh yeah we have to set up a GPS rescue mode here in the modes tab we need to add a GPS rescue mode and we need to set up a switch to trigger that mode if you&#39;re playing with GPS rescue and betaf flight I&#39;m going to assume you know how to do that and I&#39;m not I&#39;m going to resist the urge to assume everyone is a total rank beginner and show you how to set up an ox mode if you do need a tutorial on how to set up an ox mode I&#39;ll put a link in the video description to my beginner build Series where I take you through a build of a 5-in quad cupture complete from start to finish finish for total total noobs and obviously there&#39;s a section in there on how to set up box modes but we are not just going to fly into the distance and activate GPS rescue this is the next reason that GPS rescue fails for some people and again I&#39;m not trying to blame you GPS rescue has been legitimately janky in the past and it could still fail even when you did everything right but a lot of times people just didn&#39;t do the basic checks because they just didn&#39;t know they just expected it to work and then it failed and so we&#39;re going to do some basic checks and those checks are well number one ensure the firmware is built with GPS support yeah betaf flight 4.4 introduced a new way of flashing the flight controllers where features could be left out to save space well obviously if you&#39;ve gotten this far you have GPS support CU otherwise the screens that I&#39;m showing you wouldn&#39;t they would be blank or they wouldn&#39;t work for you so good to go there we&#39;re going to enable GPS and GPS rescue yes we did that in the GPS tab we enabled it check in the configurator that the module gain satellites in position reliably so I&#39;ll go ahead and plug the quadcopter in and we&#39;ll go to the GPS Tab and we&#39;ll see how many satellites we&#39;ve got locked and we have nine SATs locked already instantly this is not the first time I&#39;ve powered it up but we&#39;re good to go there now at this point we could fly out and test GPS rescue and see how it works and that will be okay as long as we are not using GPS rescue for fail safe we are only manually triggering it uh but before we activate GPS rescue we&#39;re just going to do some sanity checks like for example does my direction home Arrow Point home no not even remotely my home direct my home point should be right here and it is pointing the absolute wrong way let&#39;s check that again H not disarm okay now if I arm I&#39;ve got a new home point 0 meters to home direction home is irrelevant cuz I&#39;m right on top of it and if I fly away that Arrow should Point behind me and it totally doesn&#39;t my direction home arrow is pointing the absolute opposite direction from the actual direction home if I activate GPS rescue now bad things will happen I have to fix this now normally the reason that this would happen would be if there was a compass on my GPS and the compass orientation was incorrect if the compass was like the compass has an orientation it has to know which direction it&#39;s facing relative to the front of the quad and in fact if we look in the betaf flight configuration tab there are magnetometer alignment settings there that can be used to set the mag alignment correctly you don&#39;t see those on my screen because my magnetometer is disabled in fact I&#39;m not even sure that this GPS has a magnetometer so I&#39;m actually a little confused right now because like it should know what direction I&#39;m going you see the way that beta flight knows what direction the the quadcopter is facing when it&#39;s got a GPS think about it GPS gives position it doesn&#39;t give direction if I have a GPS receiver and I turn in a circle nothing changes so how does how does it know what direction we&#39;re facing and what direction home is the answer is that there&#39;s a parameter called GPS heading basically when you start moving in a given Direction the GPS heading tells you what direction you&#39;re moving and in in lie of a compass betaf flight assumes that&#39;s also the direction you&#39;re facing since most of the time you&#39;re flying straightforward if you were you should know that if you were to fly sideways or backwards the direction home Arrow would be completely whacked out because it it that assumption is no longer correct and if you stand in one place and rotate direction home it might like figure it out from the gyro like it&#39;s not just relying on the direction home but in general for the direction home Arrow to be accurate you need to be flying in a straight line for a short distance and you&#39;ll see that it comes around to the correct value I think I&#39;m going to bite the bullet and try and assume this is a display issue not an issue with the actual aircraft and fingers crossed it doesn&#39;t just freak out fun fun fun well great now I don&#39;t feel so confident do I so I am going to put the quadcopter somewhere reasonably safe so I&#39;m going to go out here and I&#39;m going to put the quadcopter relatively close to the ground so if it disarms it doesn&#39;t damage itself and it&#39;s well away from any thing that it might crash into I&#39;m going to activate GPS rescue here we go oh okay we&#39;re climbing that&#39;s good now is it turning the correct direction no it is flying the wrong direction and it&#39;s going to crash I Take Back Control let&#39;s try one more time I think oh I see the problem uh it was returning to home at the highest altitude I flew at let&#39;s climb to an altitude that is safe to return home at that&#39;s my mistake that&#39;s user error let&#39;s try one more time though close to the ground and GPS rescue climbing to good this is a safe altitude and are we coming home that&#39;s better oh and the direction home arrow is sort of pointing the right way okay I&#39;m going to take control before it tries to Autoland because this is a pretty tight environment but it is coming home I&#39;m going to take control that worked pretty well so let&#39;s set a new auto Landing Point here in my oh let&#39;s set the auto Landing point out in that field that&#39;s a great place to Auto Land and I&#39;m going to need to land and disarm and take off again will I succeed at that guess we&#39;re going to find oh God no okay good okay new home Point set now we&#39;re going to come over here again we&#39;re going to make sure we climb to an altitude that clears all the obstacles around us we&#39;ll go down here again a safe place where if it disarms I&#39;m not going to uh break anything and I&#39;m safe to punch out and climb and GPS rescue climbing good not quite going straight where you going buddy good altitude and we&#39;re heading home now the home arrow is pointing the right way I don&#39;t understand what changed uh this is a big open field so despite the fact that I can&#39;t see below me I&#39;m I&#39;m going to go ahead and let it descend and see what happens it should Auto Land oh boy and boom how about that that worked real freaking good worked real freaking good dude but we&#39;re not done yet you see so far we have only tested the ability to activate GPS rescue manually and what we really want is for GP us rescue to kick in when we fail safe and save us from losing our drone and that&#39;s what we&#39;re going to do next but before we do that could I remind you I have a patreon patreon is a website where you can subscribe to me for as little as $2 a month or more if you feel like I&#39;ve earned it just ask yourself if I was heading to work on the subway and Bardwell was sitting there and instead of like playing a guitar and singing a song he was giving out drone advice how much would you throw in my hat if that&#39;s $2 a month if it&#39;s it&#39;s $5 a month if it&#39;s $10 a month whatever it is head down to the link in the video description and sign up from a patreon it is the best way to support me you get access to my Discord server which is it&#39;s patrons only and it&#39;s full of just the most friendly helpful people who want to talk to you about fpv there&#39;s a troubleshooting form there&#39;s a buy sell trade forum you don&#39;t have to go in sort of the meat market of Facebook Marketplace but mostly what I hope you get when you sign up to my patreon is just the good feeling that you&#39;re supporting the work that I do here I listen to and watch content from a lot of creators and I only support very very few of them because I just they only a few of them that are up there and I really feel like they&#39;ve earned it and if today the day where you feel like I&#39;ve earned it the Link&#39;s down below I&#39;d love to have you and if I haven&#39;t earned it yet that&#39;s cool I&#39;m going to keep making content I might keep just sitting out there playing my guitar and singing my song and maybe the day will come that you decide you&#39;re going to support the next thing we&#39;re going to do is we&#39;re going to go into the betaf flight modes Tab and instead of GPS rescue we&#39;re going to add the failsafe mode and we&#39;re going to set that up exactly like GPS rescue was I&#39;m just going to reuse that switch but we&#39;re going to delete GPS rescue and what this is going to do is now when I flip that switch it&#39;s going to simulate as if a fail safe had occurred some people like to do this by just turning their radios off or yanking the module out of the back of their radio that&#39;s pretty risky because if anything goes wrong like it takes you a while to turn the radio back on right by doing this fails safe aux mode we can simulate a fail safe without actually like forcing a real fail safe so we&#39;ve got the fail safe ax mode set up on that switch and you could set it up on a different switch if you wanted you could have GPS on one switch and fail safe on another switch I just kind of don&#39;t feel like doing that um one thing you need to know though is that the failsafe switch needs to be with no other aux modes on that aux Channel it needs to only be failsafe and nothing else then we&#39;re going to go to the failsafe Tab and we&#39;re going to set the failsafe switch action to trigger stage two failsafe and we&#39;re going to set the fail safe Behavior to land the only parameter here we&#39;re going to need to change is the throttle value to use while landing and we&#39;re going to want to set this to something that slowly descends the idea here is that the quad will sort of automatically descend until well it&#39;s just going to disarm and crash so we&#39;ll interrupt it before that happens so let&#39;s uh we were at 22 23% hover let&#39;s set it something like 20% Which is going to be 1200 so we&#39;re going to set that to 1,200 and then this parameter delay for turning off the motors&#39;s in fail safe let&#39;s set that to 10 seconds in real life you wouldn&#39;t want to set this to 10 seconds most likely because the quadcopter is out of control it&#39;s fail safe and it&#39;s just sort of Auto leveling and drifting and you wouldn&#39;t want to let it do that for 10 seconds cuz it might the idea here is that the landing will kind of level It Out Slow It Down descend a little bit and then it&#39;ll disarm and do the normal fail safe Behavior but since I&#39;m going to be manually triggering fail safe we&#39;ll set it to 10 seconds and we&#39;ll take our chances I want to be able to take it out of fail safe before it just disarms and crashes itself and what we want to do here is we just want to verify that fail safe initiates Landing mode this is actually how GPS rescue starts working uh before the GPS Behavior actually takes over so I&#39;m going to trigger fail safe now using that same GPS rescue switch that I did no that is wrong that is the wrong switch I&#39;m an idiot now we&#39;ll try again yep okay working good it initiated land in and started to descend that is what we want now we go to the next step and the second step is going to be to change this fail stfe switch action to initiate stage one this is important because remember that during stage one fail safe the quadcopter is going to be waiting for Recovery of Link it&#39;s going to go to that throttle value that causes it to slowly climb and after a short period of time then it&#39;s going to trigger GPS rescue to kick in and now we need to make sure that that is going to work correctly if that&#39;s set wrong then there can be a sudden drop that causes the quad to crash or that causes it to disarm and GPS rescue never gets a chance to kick in you also should take a look at this parameter period of time in stage one after signal loss this is how long stage one is going to last before stage 2 GPS rescue ultimately kicks in the default value is 400 milliseconds and you could consider setting that shorter you could consider setting it longer if you set it shorter be aware that brief interruptions in your signal short micro fail saves could theoretically trigger GPS rescue when you don&#39;t want it to we&#39;re going to leave it at the default of 0.4 for now and what we should see here is that when I initiate the fail safe the quad levels out and starts to climb for 400 milliseconds and then enters Auto Landing where it starts to descend uh that climb may be imp perceptibly short CU 400 milliseconds isn&#39;t that long but we definitely don&#39;t want to see it descend at all so we will let&#39;s start some forward flight here and and we&#39;ll trigger it here we go yep it&#39;s in Auto Landing that worked pretty well it didn&#39;t really drop I&#39;ll tell you what let&#39;s test it a little more aggressively like what if I&#39;m moving a little more aggressively when it triggers here we&#39;re risking a crash but we got to do what we got to do [Applause] do that worked pretty [Applause] well oh that worked really well I was upside down when I triggered it that [Applause] time I was in the middle of a roll when I triggered it that time that&#39;s working really freaking well I&#39;m kind of impressed there&#39;s only one more step and that&#39;s to trigger actual GPS rescue on failsafe we&#39;re going to do that here in the failsafe tab we&#39;re going to change the failsafe Behavior to GPS rescue definitely take a look at this altitude value because you&#39;re going to want to set this based on the flight profile that you expect the default is that the quad will Ascend to the maximum altitude it was at at any time in the flight with the idea being that that will cause it to fly over any obstacles that are between it and the home position this may or may not be the right thing to do though for example if if you knew that you were flying like underneath an obstacle you might prefer that the quad returns home at its current altitude or if you knew you were going to be flying somewhere with just no obstacles out in the middle of the desert there&#39;s no point in ascending to some high altitude and flying home when you could just fly home there&#39;s also an option to have it return at a fixed altitude if you know for a fact there is a specific altitude you wanted to fly back at think about this because nothing sucks worse than GPS rescue initiating and the quad flying straight into the side of a building or something like that okay so we&#39;ve set GPS rescue as the fail safe Behavior we&#39;re going to save and reboot and at this point we&#39;ll go ahead and test it but honestly I think it&#39;s going to be pretty drama free we&#39;ve tested each of the parts individually to confirm that they&#39;re working now they should work when they come all together but there&#39;s only one way to be sure don&#39;t forget to hit save and reboot on that because then you&#39;ll take off and expect GPS rescue to work and it won&#39;t work like I totally didn&#39;t just do so let&#39;s not get ahead of ourselves though the first thing we&#39;re going to do is we&#39;re going to make sure that we had satellites when we took off we had 13 14 STS when we took off we have a good solid home location that&#39;s a terrible home location it&#39;s my porch okay well I&#39;ll take over before that before we crash into my house uh we&#39;re going to make sure our direction home arrow is pointing roughly in the correct direction but in order to do that we&#39;re going to fly straight we&#39;re going to fly straight forward for a little bit to let let it sort of sort itself out cuz I don&#39;t have a compass okay and then I&#39;m going to position my quad somewhere where I would be okay if it crashed but it probably isn&#39;t because I&#39;ve done all my checks and we&#39;re going to activate GPS rescue or fail save we&#39;re climbing that&#39;s good rescue in the upper left I see rescue is active we&#39;re turning towards home we are flying in the direction of home we are flying in the direction of home I will take over before it descends there we go that&#39;s the beginning of The Descent phase and it is roughly over where it wanted to be not freaking bad ah I&#39;m flying I&#39;m having a good time oh no I fail safed oo ah well that uh is the end of the flight testing for this phase of the video but there are still a couple more more things you need to know give me one second there&#39;s a setting in beta flight that gives you a much better indicator of the health of your GPS lock than the number of SATs locked which is what we&#39;ve been using so far and it&#39;s called hdop and I don&#39;t 100% know what hdop is beyond that it&#39;s a measure of the health of your GPS lock but you can get betaflight to show it to you in the OSD and you should totally do that I would have done it earlier in the video except I forgot how to set it up and didn&#39;t look it up again until just now here&#39;s how you do it what you&#39;re going to do is go to the CLI Tab and if we just type get hdop this parameter is that one if I type set OSD GPS unor SATs show hdop I&#39;ll just hit the Tab Key to autocomplete set equals on and save so you can see right next to the num SATs there is the hdop value it&#39;s currently 1.6 an hdop value around 1.0 or less is supposed to indicate a really good GPS fix my value of 1.6 is I don&#39;t know not as good as it could be maybe if I took it out there it would get better I don&#39;t know let&#39;s see oh God it&#39;s even worse 2.0 how bad is that here like a value of one or below gives you an accuracy of about 2.5 M so then presumably an hdop of 2.0 is an accuracy of about 5 m which isn&#39;t that good um don&#39;t know why my hdop isn&#39;t better even though I have 15 stats locked but there you go now you know at this point you have got betaflight GPS rescue just about as reliable as it can be but there are some gotas and I&#39;m going to remind you not to forget them as you go forward don&#39;t just think ah I got that betaf flight GPS rescue thing solved and go fly your quadcopter and never think about it again each time you take off make sure that before you take off you have plenty of SATs locked that you have a low hdop and after you take off fly straight in a given direction for a little while and see that the home Arrow points mostly in the correct direction if you have a compass which we haven&#39;t touched on at all because a lot of times betaflight GPS rescue doesn&#39;t actually benefit from a compass especially on very small quad cters but if you do have a compass make sure that the compass is oriented correctly I&#39;ve got a SE video where I did that the video is in inav not in betaflight but the process of figuring out if the compass is oriented correctly uh is the same and figuring out you know what values to put in there so I&#39;m going to link that down in the video description below also if you have a compass make sure that you have done a good compass calibration well away from any met metallic or magnetic objects but mostly in betaflight most people are just not going to use a compass and not really know the difference if you&#39;re about to do a really critical flight maybe do a test fly where you manually activate GPS rescue or fail safe before you just commit and full send it into the ocean just make sure that everything is good in fact you probably should be testing GPS rescue fairly regularly to make sure like that your GPS hasn&#39;t become damaged that your auto level that your angle mode your accelerometer that&#39;s the word hasn&#39;t gone out of calibration they can go out of calibration just test every little you know once a day when you fly to make sure that it&#39;s all working right to know that you can still rely on it and there are a few edge cases where for example if you&#39;re flying in a super windy environment the default B beta flight settings may not be able to get you to fight the wind and come home again you should refer to that page linked in the video description for instructions on how to configure some of those parameters to deal with some of those cases the final thing I got to say to you is if your GPS has really poor performance like it just is kind of like all over the place there are some edge cases that can cause that as well and you should look at that page to figure those out but this video is already long enough we&#39;re not going to dive into those well I hope you&#39;ve enjoyed this video about betaflight 4.5 GPS rescue but that is not the only thing that betaflight 4.5 is bringing to the party there are a ton of new features and Bug fixes and changes and I&#39;m going to be going through them there&#39;s a playlist on screen right now as well as link down in the video description and the first thing you can do is go check out the first video in that playlist which is my betaflight 4.5 release overview you and see what&#39;s coming up I&#39;ll put a link to that and a card on screen as well if you want to go straight there I&#39;ll see you there

Transcript for:Betaflight 4.5 GPS Rescue Setup and Testing

Transcript for:
Betaflight 4.5 GPS Rescue Setup and Testing