Hello, I am new to the forum. Thank you for having me. I have been flying for a little over a year now but I almost quit the hobby at least twice from the frustration of fighting windows driver issues and trying to communicate to my flight controllers.

I solved all of my WINDOWS USB driver issues by switching away from windows and going to a Chromebook. It just flat works with the BF and BLheli chrome apps!! No driver fixers, no hoops, no Bullshit!! I can say that with confidence in my case because it works with all 16 of my flight controllers of various manufactures (your actual mileage may vary). But I can't figure out a way to use BLheli_32 on a Chromebook.

So two questions... 

How many other people out there are using a chromebook for this hobby?

and..

Is there anybody that has figured out a way to use BLheli_32 on a Chromebook?

I don't use a Chromebook, but have an Acer machine with a 32GB solid state drive built in that has 8 hours battery life and weighs next to nothing, so it's very similar. I run Ubuntu on it.

BLHeliSuite runs just fine under Wine on Ubuntu, but I don't know if the _32 version does.

If you have an Intel based Chromebook, you can install Ubuntu alongside ChromeOS which will let you install Wine. See: https://www.howtogeek.com/162120/how-to-...h-crouton/

I use a windows machine but I'd probably go for one of the solutions posted above if I were to have a dedicated machine. I've never had problems with drivers on my windows machines... at least not yet!

I think I might be slightly more likely to go with a Linux machine as I've been wanting to get one going for ages now and it'd be a good excuse. Plus I could probably get away with something a little cheaper hardware wise since I could probably build it on hold hardware.

(10-Sep-2017, 05:41 PM)Carl.Vegas Wrote: I use a windows machine but I'd probably go for one of the solutions posted above if I were to have a dedicated machine. I've never had problems with drivers on my windows machines... at least not yet!

I think I might be slightly more likely to go with a Linux machine as I've been wanting to get one going for ages now and it'd be a good excuse. Plus I could probably get away with something a little cheaper hardware wise since I could probably build it on hold hardware.

Carl, you really should try Linux. A distro like Linux Mint is as easy as pie to install and use, even if you've never used Linux before. The 'Mate' edition is also much more gentle on limited hardware and a bit more 'traditional' in the desktop experience if you're used to Windows.

A great benefit on hardware with limited storage is that it doesn't take up silly amounts of your disk. The machine I'm posting this from is a case in point. It's a low powered dual core Celeron 3050 laptop. I've upgraded the RAM from the mean 2GB that it came with to 8GB. It has a tiny 32GB mmc flash chip soldered to the motherboard for a hard disk. When I bought it, it had Windows 10 installed. The hidden partition with the Windows installer took about 4GB and Windows itself took 15GB, leaving 13GB for me.

After I'd eradicated Windows and the hidden partition and installed Mint from a USB thumb drive, I had over 25GB for me! It boots in seconds and goes to sleep and wakes up when I close and open the lid.

The battery lasts ages. It's the perfect surf machine as it has no fan and Firefox is a great browser. You edit a text file to set up the system to understand VCP and DFU for modern flight controllers. It already knows what to do with a CP2102 Serial-USB converter. You just make one change to add yourself to the group that's allowed to talk to serial ports. Once you have made the required configuration changes, you never have to do them again. You don't have to download and install drivers, they're already included in Linux, as most drivers are.
 
The installation includes software to surf the web, manage photos, edit images, connect to messenger and chat systems, read, edit and create spreadsheets, documents, drawings and presentations, even in Microsoft formats (compatibility with MS formats is about 95%), watch videos, listen to music, etc, etc, etc. It's all free and works very well. I run my 3D printers with Repetier Host which is available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. 

It doesn't spy on you, bug you, try to sell you stuff, track your behaviour and profile you for profit or send your data to Microsoft/Uncle Sam/North Korea/Russia (delete as appropriate). It's free - both as in beer and in speech. The source code to every little bit of what you install is publicly available.

It runs much faster than Windows 10 on this machine.

I'll shut up now, eh?

I did a mint USB boot on an old laptop for a bit but abandoned it due to WiFi adapter problems. I may have to give it a try with a retired old vista box that I have then if all goes well I might do a laptop or something for the field

Some older hardware can be problematic, but anything from the last five years tends to just work with the latest release of Ubuntu/Mint. That's my experience at least.

BLHeli_32 is closed source and like BLHeli_S will only run on windows, or use the chrome app for BLHeli suite, but it's is not compatible with BLHeli_32, so right now the only way to use it is with a windows machine, it may work on Linux with an emulator but IDK?

I have no experience with any of this, just a bit of info from Oscar's blog see here for ESC general info - here and here for BLHeli_32 specifically.

You can read this as a request for unseen to provide more info..!

BLHeliSuite (for BLHeli and BLHeli_S) has always worked just fine on Linux using WINE.

I just downloaded BLHeliSuite32 and it also seems to run just fine:



I don't have any BLHeli_32 ESCs to connect to, but the program is written by the same guy and I see no reason why it wouldn't talk to the ESCs if I had any.

Good to know, thanks for the clarification.

(12-Sep-2017, 07:00 AM)unseen Wrote: BLHeliSuite (for BLHeli and BLHeli_S) has always worked just fine on Linux using WINE.

I just downloaded BLHeliSuite32 and it also seems to run just fine:



I don't have any BLHeli_32 ESCs to connect to, but the program is written by the same guy and I see no reason why it wouldn't talk to the ESCs if I had any.

So there is hope!! lol. Very nice. Thank you to all who have posted about this. I will have to do some digging and figure out if I can install wine and then BLheli_32 and see if I can get it working.

I have still not managed to get my Linux LT to allow proper connection on my aircraft to BF on it. It seems that the issue is a permissions thing. Have not had a chance to try to sort it through.

(20-Sep-2017, 02:18 AM)kaitylynn Wrote: I have still not managed to get my Linux LT to allow proper connection on my aircraft to BF on it.  It seems that the issue is a permissions thing.  Have not had a chance to try to sort it through.

Everything you need to know is here: https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight...ific-linux

Once you have done what it says there, you don't need to do it again!