This is a short guide that takes you through how to setup your Spektrum receiver in BetaFlight if you are new to the field and don’t know where to start.
Tell BetaFlight what type of receiver you’re using
After you’ve downloaded BetaFlight, open it up and connect your flight controller (which is hopefully connected to your Spektrum receiver!) to your computer. Once connected to BetaFlight, you need to head over to the ‘Ports’ tab and you’ll see something like this:
Depending on what flight controller (FC) you’re using, your receiver will be connected to one of the UART ports. Have a look at your FC manual if you are unsure which port you’re using. Once you’ve established this, you need to enable ‘Serial RX’ as demonstrated above.
After this, hit ‘Save and Reboot’ at the bottom of the page to save what you’ve done.
You then need to do something additional after this. You need to move on to the ‘Configuration’ tab and select ‘Serial-based receiver’ in the Receiver box on this page as seen below. In the second drop-down menu, you need to select either Spektrum1024 if you are using a DSM2-based controller, or Spektrum2048 if you are using a DSMX controller.
You can then save the setting to write them on your FC.
Bind your Receiver to your Radio
Every receiver needs to be bound to the radio controller you will be using to control your drone. Other receivers (FrSky and FlySky for example) have a pretty simple procedure of pressing a button on the receiver whilst the radio is in ‘bind mode’. Spektrum is a little more complicated however. Firstly, you need to go to the ‘CLI’ tab. This is the place where you can directly write instructions to your board - this in fact stands for ‘Command Line Interface’ (I think…). As a quick note, the place to type is at the bottom of the screen, not on the grey screen itself.
- Within the CLI type:
- set spektrum_sat_bind = 9 - for DSMX
- set spektrum_sat_bind = 5 - for DSM2
- Type save, your flight controller will now reboot. Once it has rebooted, remove the USB cable to power off the flight controller.
- After a second, reconnect the USB cable and your receiver should flash (indicating it is in bind mode)
- Turn on your R/C controller while holding the bind button (on the controller).
- Once the binding is complete, the LED on the receiver should stop blinking.
- Now connect back to BetaFlight and you can confirm it is bound by going to the receiver tab, and you should see the bars moving when you move your R/C controller sticks.
- Now you need to turn off bind mode on your receiver. To do this go back to the CLI and type set spektrum_sat_bind = 0
- Type save to apply the settings. The board will reboot and now have completed the binding process!
