Welcomed feeback, I hope so. An outsider lookin in

Yes I did, there's nothing wrong with it, he's offering his thoughts on what he would like to see to help everyone learn Deviation. If you read it carefully you'll see he refers to himself as a newbie, he's including himself in the group of people who would benefit from an idiots guide.

And I'll happily include myself in that group too.

omg i am so sorry, thanx for that.
Bill.

Sorry PB, I'll tone it down.

To set up a beastX, I watch a video. To set the end points of a Castle ESC, auto rotate and other, I watch a video. Consider a Deviation video, maybe more than one. FBL Heli, FB heli, Glider, Plane. Mixers. Some or, all? I want to (need to) watch someone set up a heli, step by step, using the advanced set up.

Well, I had to take the time to read your posts about not wanting to read...

I think my "how to" post was pretty easy to read and understand. I used words like "up-ness" and "down-ness" ... but I won't be making the movie version...

Besides... the book is always better than the movie...

Humor is good. I laugh at myself frequently. Ego left me some time ago. In my case, laughing beats crying.

The video was just a thought. I'll continue to read and take it slow. "Tenacity" always won out over "mental capability and comprehension" in my case. I'll walk a balance of bothering you guys w questions and just trying things to see cause and effect.

This is the best group I have ever seen or known about. The answers I get reflect the way each of you use and perceive deviation. It will take shape for me.

You should all be very proud of your demeanor and expertise. I'm honored to be a part and only wish I could contribute.

PS: The documentation you all have provided is superior. Once, one of my teachers threw an eraser at me, he was so frustrated at my inability to understand. It's not your fault nor, is there blame. I couldn't laugh then and I do smile now. Ill get it. Ill understand it. Takes me time. Tenacity!

Thank you all so much for allowing my voice.

ave1 wrote: "Tenacity" always won out over "mental capability and comprehension"

Now there's a T-Shirt if I ever saw one.

My high school teacher asked me, "Are you ignorant or just apathetic?"
I said "I don't know and I don't care!"

Really though...

Ask questions as you come across them. Understand each concept, so that as you progress you don't get lost by not understanding the "previous lesson" so to speak.

Hex, your post was great. I'm sure that after I read it a few more times I'll probably pretty much understand it. My RC background is having had a couple of buggies 20 years ago, then after a decade-ish gap jumped straight to CP heli. Big mistake as I really didn't stick with it long enough to even learn how to hover. Since then I've just messed around with Air Hogs planes and toy helis. Recently I picked up a couple of quads and realized that this hobby can be more enjoyable and less expensive with one good transmitter rather than a bunch of junk ones. I'm capable enough to have modded a 7e with 2 modules, extra switches, shorted the diode, added some power-on LED's, installed Deviation and gotten a couple of quads/heli's flying with my own .ini's. But the more I read the more I can see that I haven't quite understood things correctly. For example, I think my understanding of what scale and the min/max mixer values do is backward. Another thing, is it easier to switch channel controls per protocol in transmitter or by editing the model .ini? I think what I would really like is a step-by-step of how to build a custom .ini from the beginning. Your FBL example is great, and I can see it took a lot of time to put together, but it is still just a little bit over my head until I get a better grasp of the vocabulary.

Edit: To be a little more clear I'll explain a couple of my pitfalls building a model.ini for my V911. Obviously I could have just downloaded one, but I wanted to try it myself, because on the surface it didn't seem too hard. Just customize some rates and stuff, or so I thought.

The first thing I did was grab the model1.ini and set it up for Flysky. That got me bound and at least in the air...briefly. Well, the first problem was that the channels were all screwed up. Throttle and rudder were fine, but through trial and error I figured out that I needed to reverse elevator and aileron. That was confusing because I could see channel settings in the tx.ini, as well as in the transmitter channel settings. Fortunately I adjusted everything in the transmitter (or I'd really be chasing my tail by now) even though in the transmitter they were labeled cyclic 1 and 2. Which says to me that I probably have some additional swashplate mixing going on as well.

This got the V911 flying, and more or less controllable, but it was very twitchy. To tone it down some I adjusted the min/max to 70 and set the scale at 100's. This seemed reasonable based on the brief descriptions of each control in the manual, and what I for whatever reason thought min/max and scale should do. Now it was still twitchy and less controllable, but still flyable. So to tame the controls some I began messing with the speed settings to see if that helped. It did some, but now when I get out of control the lag becomes an issue.

Fortunately it is just a V911 and nothing (or nobody) has been hurt during my experimentation. I've learned a lot more since, but I haven't taken the time to apply my knowledge yet. The next step is to see if I can start to figure out some of this FMOD and switch stuff to get multiple rate setups in the same model.ini. I don't think I'll ever need anywhere close to the full capability of the mixer, but a basic course on the fundamentals would come in handy.

misterpepper wrote: Another thing, is it easier to switch channel controls per protocol in transmitter or by editing the model .ini?

Meaning if you switch from the default devo to dsm for example?

In the TX (devo6/8/12 gui) it takes 2 seconds.

Here's the default channel order, because devo is the default protocol.

So when you change the protocol to dms2 or dsmx the channels seem out of order.

But the channels are not out of order, it's just that the Source didn't change. So I click on SIMPLE and change the source to throttle.

Do the same for ELEvator and now the channels match up to the inputs.


Is that what you were referring to?

Most likely. Thanks. I'm using a 7e and the menus are different due to the limited screen resolution. That, and I think I set my heli up with in-transmitter mixing when I think the receiver board is doing the mixing for me as well, so I was having to guess what cyclic1 and cyclic2 did instead of just elevator and aileron.

I didn't realize each protocol already mapped the channels correctly, since I needed to do a fair amount of trial and error to get the controls and reversing correct. See my post above, I edited it with my first experience building my own model.ini so you can see some of my pitfalls.

I've never edited the ini file. To me the ini file is just a place for the software to save it's settings. It's not meant to be readable by humans..


Reading your edited post, Yes, you have RATES and MIN MAX mixed up.

What you would find is that the servo would stop moving after you moved the stick 70%. So from 70% to 100% the stick does nothing. This is quite the reverse of what you want to do.

MIN MAX LIMITS are to stop you from breaking servos. They are used to stop binding.

SCALE (rates) allows full movement of the stick 0% to 100% while scaling the amount of movement the servo completes.

So scale (rate) of %50 would mean that when you move the stick ALL the way (100%) the servo will only move 50% of it's range of motion.

misterpepper wrote: I think I set my heli up with in-transmitter mixing when I think the receiver board is doing the mixing for me as well, so I was having to guess what cyclic1 and cyclic2 did instead of just elevator and aileron.

That had me a little confused at first as well. The thing is, that even if the cyclic1,2 and 3 are used, there may still be NO mixing done. That is the Swash type setting. So if you see cyclic1,2,3 check the swash type. NONE means there is no mixing happening in the Transmitter. (On the 7e that would be: Model Menu->Model Type->ENT key to display the swash page.

Personally unless I am specifically setting up a flybar heli I don't use the template for that reason.

I think I've figured out most of my problems by now. I'm still just getting acquainted with Deviation, but I'll get there. My point was just to show how easy it is for somebody just starting out to get confused.

I just built the devo7e emulator to have a look... no offence to anyone's work or choice of purchase, but that gui is... well, interesting...

The menus are actually the same, it's just that they are "zoomed way in".



The devo12 touch screen is a thing of beauty... That's all I'll say.

By the way, just for comparison, here is the mixer page from er9x.



I think it has the same screen resolution as the 7e? 128x64? Anyway, now that the code for the gui has changed so much for the devo8/12 I wonder if anyone will revisit the GUI for the 7e and 10.

Hiya!

Could the font size be automatically resized based on language selected?

I'm thinking this way, English could use a smaller font, French might need a slightly intermediate font (with its chapeaus and accents), ect...

Thanks!
-=S=-

Smaller fonts require more objects thus more memory. If we were to automatically scale the display then we probably should:

1. allocate memory dynamically (probably not the best idea)
2. allocate max number of objects regardless of how many would fit.

As PB said, some parts of the UI are very painless to transform (like the menu, mixer, or settings pages), others not so much. There are lots of assumptions and hardcoded things and getting rid of them will take a while.