Betaflight 4.3 Rates Tuning: Rates are even more important than PIDs for flight feel in 4.3

hey guys i know a lot of you are interested in the new aos 5 and aos 5.5 v2 frames so i'm going to put a little bit more information at the end and these frames are now live you can go order them on cnc drones i'm going to be working on a design description video for these over the next few days but if you want to check them out before then you can i'll put a link down in the video description hi there everybody in this video i'm going to be showing you how to set up your rates in beta flight 4.3 to get the best possible stick feel for your quad and when i talk about rates i mean rates in the widest possible sense so we're also going to be talking about throttle limit throttle expo and rc smoothing which are all really important settings that you should know about and be using to get the stick feel you want but before i talk you through how to set up your rates i want to provide a perspective on the beta flight flies better versus the kiss flies better controversy that has been blowing up again recently this is a a perennial argument and there are generally people that come down on one side or the other my goal here is not to take sides but rather to provide a perspective that i think will allow both sides to agree and come together on the issue and hopefully that will be of benefit to everyone it's a lot to do in one video so let's not waste any time and let's get started i find that when talking about flight field people fall into two camps there's the set point tracking camp where people look at logging and hd video to see which firmware is able to track the control signal or the setpoint better than other firmware and they would say that the firmware that's able to track the control signal best is the one that flies the best and then the second camp is the flight field camp and this group of people feel that having flown several different firmwares they have a preference they have a firmware which they feel feels the best and that improved flight feel is what they would use to define which firmware flies better so you can obviously see where the argument can come in because people are assessing the firmwares on different criteria and my perspective on the issue is the following i would say that pid tuning and therefore set point tracking or the ability to follow a control signal when taken alone doesn't determine stick feel so this basically allows both of these positions to be correct at the same time and i think that that makes sense because it's quite clear from looking at the data from the setpoint tracking group that certainly their position is correct and i think it's also true looking at the flight field group that there are enough people who feel that there's a significant difference that that is also correct and true so you have to you have to take the assumption that both camps are right otherwise you just can't make progress for the setpoint tracking camp i would say that even if you can get your quad to track the setpoint or the control signal absolutely perfectly it still won't feel good to fly if your rates throttle and rc smoothing aren't set up correctly for your flying style and that's what we're going to be looking at later in this video so set point tracking alone isn't enough to get a quad that feels good to fly to the flight field camp i would say that poor set point tracking does negatively affect flight feel in certain challenging flight situations so even if you have a firmware that feels very good to fly if it's got poor set point tracking that is going to negatively affect flight feel in certain situations so why doesn't the tune of the pid controller really affect flight feel all that much well the goal of the pids is sort of to disappear and what i mean by that is that when the pit controller is pretty well tuned the quad here is just going to follow the set point it's going to follow the set point closely especially if you're flying relatively smoothly and not doing a lot of aggressive moves and in this case you're not really going to feel the effect of the pids at all because you're really feeling the effect of the rates and rc filtering that you have applied because the quad is doing what the set point is telling it to do however there are certain situations where the pids do matter for flight feel but it's not as often as you might think so the pids really affect flight feel in prop wash handling flying in high winds or very turbulent air where there's a lot of outside influences that are disturbing the quad and the pids need to compensate for that to keep the quad doing what you're telling it to do full stick flips and rolls especially with very high rates are another area which really taxes the pit controller so if your pids aren't well tuned you are going to feel an effect of the pid tune in that situation where you're doing a snap flip or snap roll and aggressive throttle punches and chops if your pid controller is not well tuned you're going to get bubbles when you punch and chop the throttle however i would say that these situations these three situations occur pretty rarely experienced pilots tend to intuitively fly around prop wash and some styles are more smooth with the sticks and with the throttle than others and those smoother styles are going to be less affected by the pid tune than snappier more aggressive styles so we can now agree that good set point tracking while valuable and important isn't enough on its own to give you good flight feel you also need something else so what else do you need well the answer is to get your rates and rc smoothing well tuned so that's the topic of this video and i would say that for people flying betaflight 4.3 honestly your rates and rc smoothing are going to make more of a difference to how your quad feels to fly than your pitching so you definitely want to be spending plenty of time getting your rates and rc smoothing right so that's my opinion i hope you think that i got it right if you think i did please hit that like button i'd really appreciate it and please leave a comment down below on what your opinion is and your preferred setup for best flight feel now on with the rates tuning for those of you who are maybe new to b to flight your rates are what map your stick positions to a certain rate of rotation or a certain throttle value in the air so it's not a linear scale when you move your stick there's less sensitivity at the middle of the stick travel and more sensitivity towards the end of the stick travel and the reason that we do that is so that you can both have a nice snappy fast rotation at full stick deflection but also have a very smooth controllable feel to the quad when you're just moving your sticks around near the center position it's to give you both precision and wide dynamic range at the same time rc smoothing is a function in beta flight which filters sudden jerky stick movements to give a smoother flight feel and this is a really really important setting to be able to get the right feel in your quad for the type of flying that you like to do so first things first where can we find all of these settings well let's start by looking at rates so in the pid tuning tab there's a tab called rate profile settings and here you'll be able to find the rates for roll pitch and yaw and you'll also be able to find the throttle limit which you should definitely set to scale and the throttle expo and throttle mid settings which we're going to talk about later in the video if you're looking for rc smoothing you can find that in the receiver tab and it's just here rc smoothing i would typically leave the smoothing mode set to on the setpoint to auto and auto and just change this auto factor that's really the only thing you need to tune we're going to start with the throttle because i think the throttle expo and throttle limit are perhaps the most under-appreciated settings in all of betaflight everyone should know what these settings do and everyone should be using them because they really make a huge difference to how precise your quad feels in the air throttle limit is a way to increase your throttle resolution if you find that you don't often use full throttle so if you have a build that's got a very high thrust to weight ratio you will probably find that you very rarely if ever actually go to full throttle because the quad just moves so quickly as you increase the throttle that you just never need all that power if you are in that position where you very rarely go full throttle then you can set a throttle limit typically between 75 and 100 and that will lower the amount of throttle that the quad has at full stick deflection so if you push the throttle stick all the way up you won't actually be getting full throttle you'll be getting whatever you set in the throttle limit percent here but the trade-off the benefit that you get for giving up that last 10 percent of throttle is you get more resolution across the whole throttle range and that's actually really really beneficial particularly for precision flying and controlling your altitude throttle limit is different to motor output limit in that it won't affect the pid controller so the pid controller can still use full throttle to stabilize the quad if it needs to it's just going to affect your maximum throttle position on the sticks let's talk about throttle mid and expo now throttle mid should be set to the throttle position that you use when you're just cruising around in level forward flight you can get this by looking at logs or by using the throttle position osd element which will tell you your throttle percent when you're just cruising around in level forward flight that's going to be the value that you want to set for your throttle mid and it's going to depend on the weight of your quad the amount of camera up tilt that you're running the props that you're using all of that stuff once you've got your throttle mid set right you can then increase your throttle expo to something like 0.5 or even more to get more throttle resolution for flying under low objects controlling altitude and generally just flying precisely having throttle expo on will really really help your precision flying and i like to use quite a lot of throttle expo 0.5 or sometimes even more and i think more people should be using it because it's just a completely accepted fact that having more sensitivity around center stick and less sensitivity at full stick deflection is what you want for roll pitch and you're and it's also what you want for the throttle as well you want more resolution in the zone where you need to be precise and less resolution at full throttle and zero throttle rc smoothing is another setting that i don't think is used enough and it is a must-have setting for freestyle pilots and cinematic pilots what rc smoothing does is filter your stick input to the quad to give a smoother flight feel so it's going to smooth out any jerky or twitchy stick movements to give a quad a nice smooth control input to follow and that's really important for having a smooth flying quad and getting rid of twitches and jerks in your hd footage rc smoothing really gives you the best of both worlds because you can have a very locked feeling quad that is really well tuned and tracks your control inputs really really precisely and you can also have this really buttery smooth stick response it's like flying a cadillac it just feels like it's got a lot of weight and a lot of damping and it's just a very smooth feel in the air the default in beta flight for rc smoothing is really designed for racing and if you're flying freestyle you are going to want to increase that quite a lot in fact you probably want to start at at least 50 or 60 and increase from there until you get the right feel if you're a freestyle pilot or a cinewoot pilot who's looking for a more cinematic feel i always suggest you start around 100 and possibly even increase from there because that's going to give you that really smooth feel that you're looking for in your hd footage i want to take a moment to compare using rc smoothing to some common pid tuning approaches to getting a smooth feeling quad if you try to get a smooth feeling quad by pid tuning you're going to have unwanted side effects so one way in which you can make a quad feel smoother is to reduce feed forward because feed forward can make the quad feel a little bit twitchy because it really kicks the quad into any stick movements that you make however if you reduce feed forward it will make the quad feel less twitchy but it will also make the set point tracking worse and that's going to cause issues with things like item wind-up which is going to give you potentially slow bounce back on fast moves also even if you reduce feed forward you're still going to have the p term which can react to shaking sticks and if you were to try and reduce the p term to make the quad feel smoother that's going to negatively affect your prop wash handling and also cause item wind up as well so you can't really smooth out the quad with pid tuning approaches without having unwanted side effects particularly in the item if however you use rc smoothing to smooth up the quad because you're filtering the rc signal before you get to the set point it doesn't have the same side effects the pid controller is still feeling like it's following the set point really really closely so you don't have anything like item wind up and also the p term isn't going to be reacting to any shakes or twitches because they will have been filtered out before they get to the setpoint so if you're looking for a smooth feel rc smoothing is the way to go don't use any of the pid tuning approaches reducing feed forward or reducing p term or anything like that because you're actually going to end up having a quad that flies less well at the end of it now let's talk about rates and betaflight 4.3 changes the default rates to actual rates and this means that you should never ever paste your rates from 4.2 into 4.3 if you paste beta flight rates from 4.2 into 4.3 it will interpret them as actual rates and that will be very very bad so you definitely just want to type them back in actual rates in my opinion are a little more intuitive than traditional beta flight rates so it makes it a little easier to find what works best for you the values i'm going to suggest in this video are only suggestions and unlike pids rates are not objective they're very personal and there's no right answer there's only what's right for you so you should really feel empowered to go out and find the rates that you like best let's start with center stick sensitivity and this determines how sensitive the quad is to movements of the sticks close to center and so this is going to give you that precision when you're trying to fly through tight gaps when you're trying to make precise movements where you're moving the stick very little and you're very very close to that center position i would say that a center sensitivity of 50 or even less is pretty good for proximity flying very cinematic flying and precision flying in really tight spaces for typical freestyle flying something like 70 which is the default or even a little more maybe 100 is just about right and dynamic flying styles spanx bang some line of sight flying styles and racing like a little bit more center sensitivity in general they tend to run more like 200. so depending on what type of flying you're doing you'll find the center sensitivity that's right for you max rate determines just how fast the quad is going to rotate at the full stick deflection racing and cinematic flying they tend to go for a lower max rate something around 400 or 500 degrees a second i know evan turner 533 for him of course typical freestyle flying tends to be around 700 and the beat of light default is 670. and really snappy style freestyle flying tends to have a higher max rate something around 1100 degrees per second or even a little more than that and that's the style that you tend to see people like mr steel flying where they can do those really really fast snap flips and rolls expo is a little bit more difficult to explain expo extends the influence of the center stick sensitivity setting and what i mean by this is if you have a very large expo like this blue line here the stick sensitivity remains pretty similar to what it is at the center stick position for most of the stick travel if however you have very small amount of expo the sensitivity starts to change immediately as you move the stick away from center and so as you move the stick away from center that sensitivity is going to increase much more quickly and you can see the effect of changing the expo in this graph here and you can see that when you're changing it in the configurator so you can kind of see what effect the change is having in general i don't run much expo on my rates but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't if you find that you really like having a more linear feel towards the center stick position then definitely try adding a bit of expo i hope this video helps you to find that perfect flight feel when you're getting set up with betaflight 4.3 and tuning it on your quad i think that the improved setpoint tracking of 4.3 versus 4.2 and pretty much any other firmware is definitely something that's really really worth having and if you can get the right flight feel by getting your rate set correctly rc smoothing set correctly and your throttle configured just right you are going to have a better flight experience with a firmware that tracks setpoint better so i hope this video helps you to do that if you like this work and you'd like to support the channel then i do have a patreon if you feel like i've earned your support with this video and the previous videos i've done then i'll put a link down the video description to where you can find that and you can join from just a few dollars a month and you get some nice perks on my discord server and some sneak peeks of the upcoming projects that i'm working on that's all i have for you for today so until next time i wish you all very very happy flying so i promised you a little sneak peek of the aos 5 v2 and ars 5.5 v2 so this is the aos5 v2 lots of updates from the v1 frame but i think the one that i'm most proud of is the aesthetics of this frame some people have said it looks kind of insect-like other people have said the arm design kind of looks like a spider's web i really like the way this looks i mean the aos 5v1 wasn't a bad looking frame but i think this one really takes it to the next level the arm design the arm geometry has got changed quite a lot we now have a strut in here that's more durable in front impact and it's also a little bit stiffer so the resonance performance is even better we've got a three point motor mounting rather than four screw motor mounting and that just removes a hole that causes a stress riser in in front impact so it should make the arm even more durable as well on the top plate we've got captive battery straps so the battery straps can't move around they're kind of captive in the top plate so feature that a lot of people ask for and there's also an xt60 an x260 here passed through through the top plate so you can keep all of those wires away from the props you never cut your battery leads with the props the gopro mount on the front of the aos 5v2 now has press nuts in the top plate so you can just screw straight down into those press nuts makes mounting the gopro super super easy and of course it uses exactly the same 32x32 mounting that other aos frames use the stack situation we have three stacks in the aos 5v2 front middle and rear and they all support 30 by 30 and they all support the new one watt vtx by hd0 so you can fit that in this frame as well if you use an air unit in the back then you just need to move your stack to the front position in the aos 5. but if you're using something like a vista or analog or anything like that shark bite then you can run a central stack and put the vtx in the rear the aos 5.5 v2 looks really really similar in fact if you didn't put them side by side you probably couldn't tell the difference um it's just a little bit of a bigger platform can run 5.5 inch props rather than i think the maximum is 5.2 on the aos 5 i think you might be able to squeeze 5.25 in but it's going to be very very tight see how you go but this can run up to 5.5 inch props it's a bit of a bigger platform and you can put an air unit in the back of this and still run a full-size stack in the middle just because it's a slightly bigger platform both frames don't have props in view both frames have the press nuts for the gopro the captive battery straps the xt60 through and support either a 20mm or 19mm camera so i'm gonna do a full design description of these frames but that's a quick rundown of the main features and i'll put a link down in the video description to where you can check it out get a bit more information and order one if you'd like to try

Channel: Chris Rosser

Views: 25,469

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Id: _WqKaJ79HGU

Length: 24min 7sec (1447 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 20 2022