The Betaflight devs posted the final release of Betaflight 4.0 just a couple of hours ago. All details are at the link below

https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight.../tag/4.0.6

Betaflight 4.0.x Release notes:-

https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight...20Notes.md

Betaflight 4.0.x Tuning notes:-

https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight...ning-Notes

Betaflight 4.0.x community tuning presets:-

https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight...ty-Presets

You'll also need the Betaflight Configurator 10.5 from the following link to go with this release because it includes new additional settings and CLI commands for Betaflight 4.0. It's still backward compatible with older versions of Betaflight firmware that you might have installed on some flight controllers.

https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight...tag/10.5.1

In addition, for Blackbox analysis of Betaflight 4.x blackbox logs you will the new 3.3 version of Blackbox Log Viewer available from the following link.

https://github.com/betaflight/blackbox-l.../tag/3.3.1

And finally, a new version of the LUA scripts for that are compatible with Betaflight 4.0 are available from the following link.

https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight.../tag/1.3.0

Quote:It took us a long time, but now it’s here, and it’s got so many new things!

When we released 3.5 in August last year, the number of different targets supported by Betaflight had reached 150, and maintaining them was becoming a major effort and taking up a lot of our time. It became clear that we had to do something. We had been working on changing the architecture of Betaflight to make it possible to use the same firmware for different flight controllers for some time, and so we decided to complete this change before releasing the next version, and that because of this fundamental change the next version would be 4.0.

As we approached the originally set release date for Betaflight 4.0, we realised that we were not quite ready, and we decided to take another three months, in order to be able to complete the work we had started.

So now, here we are, ‘Unified Targets’, as we called the new ‘one firmware for many flight controllers’ technology, is now a reality in Betaflight 4.0. There is still some work left to be done to add support for flashing Unified Targets with their configurations to Betaflight configurator, but once this is done, we will be able to allow manufacturers to make firmware for any number of boards, or RTF products, available directly in configurator.

As you have come to expect from Betaflight, we have picked up a number of new and exciting improvements to the flight performance, like ESC RPM based filtering, D term management with D_min, and throttle based dynamic gyro and D term filtering.

And, again as expected we have added some more, non flight related new features like launch control, OSD profiles, and support for on-board SPI attached RX.

For an extended list of new features see below.

To get the best out of the flight performance improvements, please read these tuning tips.

If you are upgrading from an earlier version of Betaflight, please read the following section containing a list of things that you might have to change in your configuration.

We have tried to make this release as bug free as possible. If you still find a bug, please report it back to us by opening an issue here.

If you want to talk about Betaflight, ask configuration questions, or just hang out with fellow pilots, you can do this in our Facebook group.

Betaflight also has a presence in the Slack messaging platform. Register here, and then come join us in Slack. Most developers hang out there, so this is a great place to talk about the things you are tinkering with in Betaflight, or get help with really complicated configuration problems.

Kia kaha (stay strong)

I'm planning on upgrading my whoop this night and if the weather allows the 5" tomorrow!
As anyone done it yet? Not the RC's though.

Well, in angle mode the thing wobbles like mad when i throttle up. In airmode it's mostly fine...

Just loaded the final 4.0.0. Seems to fly fine so far. It required Configuarator 10.4 be upgraded to 10.5.0 and then 10.5.1.

I don't want to unnecessarily put today's planned flying session in jeopardy so I'm going to do that session on 3.5.7, then when I get back I intend to updrade to 4.0.0 and do a hover test in the back garden (no room to do an actual flight so a hover test will have to do).

Stock rates on the Japalura fly pretty awesome. Bumped them up a little as I like slightly higher rates, but otherwise a stock tune. The filters seem to be set up great for the 3" as well. Have fun on your session today! I did not encounter anything after loading 4.0.0 that made the quad not instantly flyable. Nothing to iron out, just loaded my scrubbed DIFF from 3.5.7 that is nothing more than radio, OSD and port settings. Was up and flying 30 seconds after loading.

Well my flying session was cut short. The yellow and orange cones dotted around the park was a telltale sign. After 1 pack people started to congregate at one side of the park. I got another pack in before I decided it was probably time to call it a day. Looked on the internet and discovered that there's a 5km run there every Saturday morning at 9am. The park is only ~100m x ~150m and while I can handle a few dog walkers, when 100+ people are on the scene running around the perimeter it's not really safe to be ragging a 5" quad around in such an enclosed area, so it was unfortunately game over. It meant I came home with 3 fully charged packs which wasn't the really the plan but never mind. Next time I'll need to make sure I get there at 7:30am or earlier.

On a happier note my quad is now on Betaflight 4.0.0. I re-applied any settings from my 3.5.7 setup to do with peripheral configuration (receiver, VTX, ESCs, Beeper, LEDs, OSD etc.) while leaving any flight controller and PID settings on their BF 4.0 defaults. Oh, except the PID loop which I changed to 8K as I was using on previous versions of BF. I'm still using the default rates so no change there for now.

One thing to be aware of is the Gyro/Accelerometer alignment. You can check correct gyro orientation using the moving image of your model on the main "Setup" page. For some reason on my Matek F405-STD the default BF 4.0 configuration is "CW 270°" but it needs to be changed to "CW 180°" for everything to work as expected. Interestingly, on BF 3.5.7 it was just set as "default". The white arrow on my board is pointing forward. I don't know why the change between previous version of BF and BF 4.0 but Matek do also state the need to change that in the documentation on their main website HERE. A high five to Matek for providing first class documentation for their hardware and keeping it up to date  It's possible that other flight controllers may also need a similar tweak applied so just keep that in mind before rushing out to do a flight. See the screenshot at the bottom of this post.

Anyway, hover flight in the back garden is done and everything seems to be working as expected If I get a chance later I might try to take it out later for a proper FPV test flight in the park and try to use up the 3 LiPos that are still currently charged up from this morning's session, but I think all the teenagers start to gather there during the afternoon / early evening so it may be a no-go.

Which way did you mount the FC? By default, the lipo leads should go to the right side.

I have to make sure that if I upgrade my Matek to double check the orientation. Thanks for the information. It is weird that the alignment is different.

(13-Apr-2019, 10:24 PM)voodoo614 Wrote: Which way did you mount the FC? By default, the lipo leads should go to the right side.

I have to make sure that if I upgrade my Matek to double check the orientation. Thanks for the information. It is weird that the alignment is different.

I have the STD version of the F405, not the CTR, so it doesn't have LiPo connections. My LiPo is connected to a PDB.

Only the F405-STD and F405-MINI need their gyro alignment reconfigured to "CW 180°". The F405-CTR doesn't need any changes applied and it can use the default value of "CW 270°".

Details are on the following web page...

http://www.mateksys.com/?p=5159#tab-id-2

Matek Wrote:After flashing BF4.0, MUST set F405-STD & F405-mini first gyro to CW180 in configurator to follow the arrow forward

Keep default CW270 for F405-CTR if arrow forward

You know what, I have the original AIO. It defaults at 270.

I have no idea why Matek don't just make it default at 0 when the arrow points forward. Bad design.

(13-Apr-2019, 11:02 PM)voodoo614 Wrote: You know what, I have the original AIO. It defaults at 270.

I have no idea why Matek don't just make it default at 0 when the arrow points forward. Bad design.

A lot of the time orientation of components is down to physical space constraints. To have the gyro in the "correct" forward facing orientation on the board isn't always possible without a complete re-design because it may require extra space for traces to be able to run around the board to their destination, which either eats up valuable real estate on the board, or the space for doing that just isn't available. This is also the reason why you sometimes see square/rectangular components at at 45 degree angle to others which is simply done to reduce the number and length of traces needed from its pins to other components.

In previous versions of Betaflight an internal gyro offset was coded into each target source file if required to make it look to the end user that a physically orientated gyro chip was still at zero degrees. However, for Betaflight 4.0 onwards they have started to implement "Unified Target" configurations so I guess using a coded offset in the same way it was done before doesn't fit in with the new Unified Target architecture of the code base.

Reading through the Betaflight 4.0 release notes, it seems that the need to manually configure gyro orientation is just a temporary workaround for now until they implement a mechanism to do that automatically via the Unified Target configurations which will likely appear in a future release.

Quote:the gyro configuration was unified from being done by gyro hardware model to being generic for all gyro models. This means that for some targets that are used for multiple different boards that come with different gyro models that are mounted with different orientations, it is necessary from Betaflight 4.0 on to manually set gyro_1_sensor_align (and / or gyro_2_sensor_align for boards with a second gyro) to match the gyro orientation on the board that is used. See note #6761 for an explanation, and instructions for individual boards. This is a temporary workaround, per-board configurations with correct gyro alignment will be released as Unified Target configurations (#5868);

So I tested Betaflight 4.0 out properly today. I ripped 4 packs in the local park and everything seemed absolutely fine with no issues whatsoever.

However, it was really a bit too windy to be flying today and I didn't get a whole lot of quality flight practise in because I spent most of my time fighting the wind to avoid being blown out of restricted space I was flying in, plus it was bitterly cold with the wind chill. My fingers felt like icicles. I reckon it was probably a "feels like" zero degrees or less (Celcius). Landing was also tricky because the wind was behind the quad when coming into land so I had to apply so much back tilt to avoid being blown into myself that with the camera angle it was difficult to see the ground. Dog walkers also turned out to be a PITA today too and it took me 1.5 hours to burn through 4 packs simply because I spent most of that time sitting around freezing my butt off waiting for them to leave.

Anyway, at least BF 4.0 appears to be stable enough to fly with in confidence.

One thing to note is that the voltage scale is now to 2 decimal places so the voltage flitting around in the OSD of your goggles is a lot more prominent than it was previously. I can see in the dump file that all "voltage" related settings have had a 10x multiplier added to them (i.e. a vbat_min_cell_voltage setting of 33 in BF 3.5.7 is now 330 in BF 4.0) although I can't see anything in the release notes relating to this apparent voltage precision change. I'm not sure if there's a configurable setting to only display 1 decimal place in the OSD, but if there is then I've not yet found it.

The same experience I have had with it. I have been modding the rates a bit as it changed a few dynamics of how The Japalura flies, but it works "out of the box" on my 5"...even with shredded props! I also feel that my motors are landing cooler.

Noted that extra precision on the voltage display. Not able to find anything so far that allows it to be configured back to 1/10's only. If I find a way, I will post it here.

(14-Apr-2019, 03:42 PM)kaitylynn Wrote: Noted that extra precision on the voltage display.  Not able to find anything so far that allows it to be configured back to 1/10's only.  If I find a way, I will post it here.

I did some more digging around and there isn't any way to control how many decimal places appear on the voltage display in the OSD, however, someone has already made a code change to show the voltage to 3 significant digits which means prior to 10V the OSD will show 2 decimal places, and past 10V the OSD will only show 1 decimal place. There is currently a pull request queued up with the necessary code changes implemented, so assuming it gets approved then it should make it into the next minor Betaflight 4.x release. See the link below...

https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight/pull/7952

EDIT: The above code change has now been approved, merged into the Betaflight master trunk, and added to the Betaflight 4.1 milestone list. So it will get delivered with BF4.1.

FYI, for blackbox analysis of Betaflight 4.x blackbox logs, the new version of Blackbox Log Viewer is required (v3.3.0). That new version was just released today. I've added a link to that in the first post of this thread.