Greetings All….

Curious if anyone has any ideas on some issues I am having.  I have a ZMR 250 (I know I know obsolete, but it is the quad I learned on and it has sentimental value…..and it still flies nicely…or it did).  Anyway, I have had an ESC going out for some time.  Prop #3 doesn’t spin up as fast as the others (starts out erratically)  and when I “slam” the throttle shut, 1,2 & 4 stop almost immediately, but #3 coast down slowly.  The ESC is an RG20 running BLheli ver. 14.2 (never bothered to upgrade them).  So anyway, I ordered a new ESC.  So I am thinking that I will need to calibrate at a minimum the new ESC and it would probably be a good idea to recalibrate all of them, so I went ahead and installed the latest version of BLheli in anticipation of installing the new ESC.  I tried to use pass-through to “look” at the settings on the existing ESCs and got the error “Initialization of Flight Controller Denied”.  Hmmmmmm.  Ok, off to cleanflight I go to look at some of the setting in the FC (Naze32 rev6).  I immediately got a message that I had to upgrade the firmware on the FC……I’ve had it about a year.  Ok…I get that, so I saved all my settings and flashed the new firmware.  I re loaded my settings and had to add some settings back manually, but it worked (the quad flew).  I am using Cleanflight 2.0.0 and after I loaded the new firmware, I could NOT find anywhere to enable Vbat in Cleanflight and the damn thing just keeps screaming that I have a low battery (I don't).  I am still getting my altitude so I don’t think it’s the telemetry, but I have checked to see that softserial is set up properly anyway. I have not yet checked to see of all the connections etc. are ok…..not in depth anyway.....using just a cursory glance they all seem fine.  Second issue….when the quad hovers now it kind of ….”shakes”…kind of like the FC is over compensating as it adjust the speed of each motor?  None of my PIDs were changed and it didn’t do it before I flashed the firmware.

I know this is kind of a rambling post and I don’t want anyone to go do a bunch of research because I will be doing that anyway, I am just wondering if anything stands out as an obvious issue or screw up on my part (that’s what it usually is).

Thanks guys, questions/comments/advice & ridicule welcome!

The fact that you saved and used your old settings with the new firmware may have something to do with it. Whenever I flash new firmware, I always start from scratch

(17-Apr-2017, 02:13 AM)RENOV8R Wrote: The fact that you saved and used your old settings with the new firmware may have something to do with it.  Whenever I flash new firmware, I always start from scratch

Point taken.  I was operating under the premise that new versions of the firmware would be backward compatible.  Perhaps that is an incorrect assumption.  I'll keep it in mind, thank you!

The key to your passthrough problem is the Naze32 Rev6.

If it's one of the early Rev6 versions, it doesn't work with passthrough and it also back feeds USB power to your PDB which means the ESCs are powered all the time.

As RENOV8R correctly points out, you can't restore the settings from an older version of the flight controller firmware onto a new version. Often, defaults and parameters change between releases. In this case, it's even more extreme than that as Cleanflight 2.0 is actually Betaflight 3.1!

(17-Apr-2017, 11:24 AM)unseen Wrote: The key to your passthrough problem is the Naze32 Rev6.

If it's one of the early Rev6 versions, it doesn't work with passthrough and it also back feeds USB power to your PDB which means the ESCs are powered all the time.

As RENOV8R correctly points out, you can't restore the settings from an older version of the flight controller firmware onto a new version. Often, defaults and parameters change between releases. In this case, it's even more extreme than that as Cleanflight 2.0 is actually Betaflight 3.1!

Thanks for the input.  It's actually a Rev6a (I shouldn't have left that little detail out, sorry) and it does work with passthrough because that is how the ESCs were initially programmed when I first put the machine together.  I was not however aware you couldn't upgrade to the next firmware release and not use your existing settings.  Thanks to both of you for setting me straight on that.

UPDATE:  Gentlemen, seems you were both correct.  Looking at the setting for the board in the new firmware, many of them were different.  The PID values themselves were the same, but all the rc rates were pretty well hosed.  There were some other issues as well, but the one that took me the longest to figure out was the telemetry.  I wasn’t getting it back to my Taranis anymore.  When I tried to invert it, it just told me it was an invalid command.  Seems the feature has been renamed in the latest firmware.  It used to be telemetry_inversion and now it’s tlm_inversion and of course it was off instead of on.  Thanks for your help.