Betaflight 4.0 released
• Chris
This release cycle took a bit longer than usual, but now it is here, the newest release of Betaflight - Betaflight 4.0. A lot of brushless whoops that came out in the past couple of months already come with Betaflight 4.0 flashed. But why did it take so long and what exactly did change?
It took some time for the newest iteration of Betaflight to be released - the 4.0 release has now been overdue for some months, but why did it take longer this time? The team decided to take some more time to get a polished release especially the unified targets feature. With Betaflight 3.5 the amount of supported targets - the flight controllers Betaflight is running on - reached 150, which is a massive amount of targets to manage. This took the team a considerable amount of time to do - time better spent in implementing new and exiting features for us pilots.
The unified targets feature solves this problem. Now a single firmware can be used on a multitude of flight controllers, instead of each flight controller having its own dedicated version as it was up until now.
Of course there are also some great features for us pilots. Something I have been looking forward to are the OSD profiles. They allow you to have multliple different OSD layouts that you can change with a switch on your remote. For example you could have one screen with full stats and one screen to only show the battery warnings. This is useful if you want to have a clean image while recording your non HD brushless whoop feed, other than that you can now also have stick overlays in the OSD.
Another very exciting feature is real time ESC RPM based filtering. This is a big improvement in filtering but will only work with blheli_32 ESC’s and improves filtering by having feedback of how fast the motors are spinning. This feature might not yet be interesting for brushless whoops since very few of them use blheli_32 ESC’s but I bet next season we will see more and more brushless whoops equipped with blheli_32 ESC’s.
Throttle based gyro and D term filtering which improves the filtering depending on how much throttle you are currently using.
Cell based profile switching allows you to have different PID profiles for different battery configurations and the profiles are automatically switched depending on detected cell count.
The yaw axis has now way more authority, so sharper, more snappy flying is now possible out of the box.
When updating Betaflight I like to dump my settings, or at least the difference to the defaults before updating the firmware. To dump all settings invoke the dump command from the CLI tab. This will display all the current settings. If you just want the difference to the default settings, type diff in the CLI and save the output to a file. It is not recommended to simply paste the whole dump if you are upgrading from 3.5 to 4.0 but sections that are related to your serial setup, buzzer configuration and mode switches you can copy/paste without any issues, so that you get all of that set up quickly.
In my opinion those are the most interesting new features, but there is more, to see all of the changes check out the release notes.
Have you tried the newest Betaflight version? What do you think?
Chris is a Vienna based software developer. In his spare time he enjoys reviewing tech gear, ripping quads of all sizes and making stuff.
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