Having upgraded my 7E to 6 switches, the next thing I worked on was to add 2 potentiometers to it. These will show up as AUX4 and AUX5 inside the DeviationTX firmware. It’s a slightly trickier process than the switch upgrade, as there are no convenient pins on the main board to use. As such, it requires soldering directly to the pins on the processor. This however, like the processor upgrade, can be done safely if you take the necessary…
For me, my biggest gripe with the Devo7e transmitter is that it comes with only two 2-way switches, HOLD and FMOD. My second biggest gripe is that it has no potentiometers. I know that there are mods available to get 2 extra 3-way switches, but I wasn’t really satisfied with that, so I set about looking for someway to get more. The stock Devo7e has already reached it’s limit for new code so it wasn’t really possible to do this until…
[UPDATE: 17th May 2016] While the method below can still be used to build from source, PhracturedBlue has release a Docker container that contains the build environment with a GUI to ease the process. Find the wiki documentation about it here. Alternatively, if you do not want to build from source yourself, compiled versions can be found on the Test Builds page on deviationtx.com. Let’s walk through the process of building DeviationTX from source. You’ll need to do this if you…
We’ve now got a nice new processor installed in our 7e and we need to flash a boot loader onto it. The bootloader we need is the 256K variant that PhracturedBlue has so nicely modified for us. It is based on the original stock Walkera bootloader, but allows for files larger than 128K to be uploaded. You can find it from the links that I put in the “DeviationTX: Build environment and tools” post. I’ll assume that you’ve also already acquired and…
This is a short post of the build environment and tools that I have been using to experiment with and hack the Devo7e. With these tools, we can recover from permanently bricking the transmitter (most of the time). A quick list to make everything easy to find: Walkera Dfuse Upgrade Tool (Linked on deviationtx.com) Deviation Uploader (Download from deviationtx.com) Docker (docker.com) MWM’s Deviation Docker image (Link to forum post) PhracturedBlue’s Docker build environment container (Link to wiki) PhracturedBlue’s Devo7e bootloaders (Stock 128K and Upgraded…
I took the plunge and decided to upgrade the processor in my Devo7e transmitter to a STM32F103RET6. This upgrade is not yet officially supported by the DeviationTX team yet, but I figured it was doable as the upgrade doesn’t really affect the code much and I’m fairly comfortable with compiling from source code. In this post, we’ll look at the hardware end of the upgrade. Desoldering and resoldering a SMD processor isn’t really that hard and the potential for damaging your…
It’s been about 2 weeks now since successfully setting up the stm32f103 toolchain on my mac. Darn that was hard. Anyhow, I wanted to play around with telemetry for the Frsky receivers since ER9X supports it. I do have a hub, but one thing that bothered me was that to get the telemetry, we would be buying and installing a bunch of sensors that our main flight controllers already have. With this in mind I set about to seeing how…
I hadn’t gotten around to modifying the internals of my TX so I figured I’d have a go at reflashing the Hobby King 20A (F-20A) ESCs first. I chose this ESC because: They were really cheap They supported reflashing with SimonK’s firmware They had their test pads in a row so it would be easier All it’s FETs were the same (N-Channel) Some wiring had to be done to match the pin-outs from my 10 pin AVR programmer to the…
I finally received the AVR USBASP programmer that I ordered on aliexpress.com today. I’ve been waiting for this so that I could start tinker with reflashing of ESCs and the Turnigy 9x that I had recently bought. I choose this one cause it had some built in protection (diodes) added. It was also voltage selectable (3.3V and 5V) via adding or removing a 0ohm resistor. I plan on replacing the resistor with headers and a jumper later. It comes default…
Here is a walk through on how I installed the Turnigy 9x LED backlight kit from hobbyking.com. You get a foam backing and the actual backlight panel that has a wiring harness attached to it. As my old soldering iron is fried, and all I have my butane field iron, I am only going to do the plug and play install for now. I don’t really want to use the field iron to solder things to the TX’s logic board…