Turnigy 9x and Arducopter flight mode setup

This is a tip on how to set your stock Turnigy 9X radio prog.mix up for Arducopter 2,5 flight modes.

First of all you might want to take a look at RCExplorer aka David Windestål's "Arducopter - Quick setup guide".

So now I'm assuming you have your ardu-board setup correctly and want to program your radio to handle 6 flight modes using a 3 position switch and one 2 position switch.

First of you have to hook CH6 from your receiver to the AUX1-channel on your ardu-board, usually input 5. Then connect your board to your computer and start Mission Planner. Connect to your board and go to the configuration tab and select Flight Modes.

To assign flight modes to your different stick positions you will have to set the Pulse Width (the PW in PWM) according to the different modes. In the right box you see what to aim for, or rather the span of that specific mode, and in the top one you see your current PWM and Mode. When you first plug your radio in you might not get any reading at all, but this is probably because you haven't set your radio up for prog.mixing and aux-channel output.

To enable prog.mixing output on your radio, you first have to assign CH5 to GEAR in AUX-CH, like so:

Never mind CH7, I use this channel to control my camera pitch, but you can set this to NULL. Also make sure that CH6 is NULL.

Now go to your PROG.MIX-setting.

What I wanted from my setup is to have the three most used modes on my 3 position switch (F.MODE) and then flick the GEAR switch and have 3 more flight modes. Like this:

GEAR switch down (or away from you):
  - Stabilize (N)
  - Alt Hold (1)
  - Loiter (2)
GEAR switch up (towards you):
  - Loiter (N)
  - Auto (1)
  - RTL (2)

This way I dont have to use the gear switch as much and only use the 3 position switch (F.MODE), but at the same time be able to use 6 different modes if I want to. Although I could have 6 mode, I have Loiter at two positions. This is to easily set the copter into Loiter mode either with the GEAR switch or the F-MODE switch.

At this point I might mension that you could replace the GEAR switch with THR CUT if you would rather use your left hand. This is simply done at the AUX-CH, where you set THR CUT instead of GEAR on CH5.

Now to try and explain how to set the UPRATE, DNRATE and SW. STATE, MASTER, SLAVE and OFFSET are the same on all three.

Let's start with SW, which is the position the F.MODE-switch is in. This can be NOR, ID1 and ID2 which translates to position N, 1 and 2 on the F.MODE-switch. For some reason, don't ask me why, I set NOR on MIX3 and ID2 on MIX1. I think you can probably swap them to have some consistency.

By setting SW to NOR you tell the radio that when the F.MODE switch is in position N send a signal at, for example, 20% of available throw or width. So far this is not so complicated. But you are "mixing signals" and this means that the MASTER switch (in my case the GEAR switch) has a say in it too. Your signal width is cut in half. This means that when your GEAR switch is down you only operate below the middle point in your signal's width, and with the switch up you operate above the middle point.

In the three pictures above you can see that UPRATE for NOR = 22, ID1 = 52 and ID2 = 91. The DNRATE for NOR = 88, ID1 = 41 and ID2 = 11.

You cannot just copy the values I have in my settings to get a prefect setup, you will have to experiment with DNRATE and UPRATE yourself to get the PWM right. This is because every radio is a bit different and the PWM might be a bit different. The PWM's I was aiming for was 1190, 1295, 1425, 1555, 1685, 1810

This is what you might want to accomplish:

Once you have your PWM's right, you just assign them to the flight modes you like.