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if you've got a radio that runs open tx whether it's a freesky x9d x9 lite qx7 uh x light horus x10 radio master tx16s jumper t18 if you've got any other radios out there that run open tx then eventually you're going to run into a situation where you need to flash new firmware to the radio and that's what we're going to go over in this video three ways the three ways that there are to flash new firmware to your open tx radio and i'm going to bet that you probably know one of these ways already the easiest one but i'm going to show you a way to flash firmware to the radio that will recover the radio if you have completely bricked it i've had people tell me oh the radio is dead i guess it's trash and i showed him how to get the firmware back on the radio and bring it back using one of the methods in this video i'm joshua bardwell and you're going to learn something today [Music] [Applause] [Music] before we get into this video i want to get one thing out of the way i am using the radio master tx16s and that is going to give some of you guys pause if you don't own that exact radio just like when you buy a windows laptop it doesn't matter who made the laptop they all run windows and they all work pretty much the same the same thing is true for open tx radio so no matter what radio you've got the steps i'm about to show you are going to be pretty much the same and the first way we're going to flash firmware to the radio doesn't even involve using a computer we're going to put the firmware on the sd card to the radio and flash from the sd card in order to do that we're going to turn the radio on we need to just get the firmware onto the sd card and of course you could take the sd card out of the bottom of the radio and put it into your computer that's fine but there's an easier way to do it we're just going to plug in to usb and when we do that the radio is going to ask whether we want usb joystick or usb storage we're going to pick usb storage and after that these two usb drives are going to pop up on the computer now this one with the firmware.bin and the firmware.txt do not mess with that that is your radio's firmware if you mess with that you'll break the radio and then we'll have to do something else allow to get to get the firmware back so we're just going to close that instead we want this one usb drive with these folders in it we're going to go into the firmware folder and in here we can drag and drop the firmware that we're going to flash now where did you get the firmware file that you're trying to flash let's not worry about that for now let's just assume you've got a firmware file that you're trying to flash and you're going to put it here in this folder on your sd card after that i'm going to unplug usb and i'm going to power off my radio then i'm going to boot the radio up in what's called bootloader mode and the way to do that for almost all of these radios is to hold the two trim switches inward get out like this hold the two trim switches inward while you power the radio on and you should get this screen the open tx bootloader screen the exception of this is if you have a freesky x light the x light doesn't have trim switches it has a d-pad and of course you can't press left and right on the d-pad at the same time the way that you get into boot loader on an x light is you press downward down not down inward center you press on the center of the d-pad while you turn the radio on and it's a little bit tricky because if you accidentally like click over to the left or to the right then it won't go into bootloader mode so it always takes me like two or three tries to get the next light into bootloader mode because i'm it's tough to just click down center in without accidentally clicking some other direction anyway now we're in boot loader mode the next thing to do is to highlight write firmware and click enter again the enter button is going to be a little different on all the radios on minus the jog wheel you might have a separate enter button we're going to pick the firmware that we want to use we're going to click enter and then we're going to long press enter to flash the firmware to the radio now if you go into that menu and you don't see the firmware then either you didn't put it in that folder on the sd card or the firmware may not have the correct name it needs to end with dot bin dot bin i believe and on some older radios if the firmware has more than eight characters in the file name it won't show up so on some older radios you actually have to rename the file in windows to something with fewer than with eight or fewer characters but that's that's pretty old you probably won't run into that writing completed we'll hit return we'll exit the radio will reboot and our new firmware is there now that technique is great if you intend to flash back and forth between different firmwares or if you just don't have easy access to a computer if somebody else can get you the file that you need then you can just flash it without ever touching a computer i would advise you to resist the temptation to just have a bunch of firmwares on your sd card and flash back and forth between them and why would you even do that i don't know but sometimes when you flash between firmwares if there's a different version of the firmware the radio the models and settings in the radio will be incompatible the radio will say bad radio data and then it'll completely reset your radio back to factory defaults so i hope number one i hope you backed up your models and settings before you did this and number two if you were like out in the field or something and you just like decided hey i want to flash my radio well there's a chance you would just wipe your radio which you may not want to do nevertheless that's probably the simplest and easiest way of flashing the radio because it doesn't involve any drivers or any of that nonsense with your computer you just put it on the sd card and you go the next way to flash the radio involves this app opentx companion and although many people try to avoid using this app you you shouldn't you should use it because you can back up your radio and that's really valuable and there are some setup things that are easier to do in opentx companion than they are to do in just in the radio you could you could move your models and settings between radios when you get a new radio oh that's pretty cool i have a video about that actually link in the video description to the video about how to move your models and settings between radios check that one out after you're done with this one so the first thing we're going to do with opentx companion is we're going to click settings and we're going to look at our radio profiles and chances are if you just installed opentx companion you only have one radio profile and it is default if you have more than one radio you're going to need one profile for each radio i'm going to click settings and then settings again and here i can change the profile name to match the name of my radio but the most important thing is i'm going to change the radio type and that tells companion what firmware to download based on what type of radio that i've got if i choose the wrong radio type then flash it to the radio i could break the radio and then i'll need to use method number three which is coming at the end of this video to get it back so that's set correctly i'm going to set these build options the build options i always use no heli because i don't have any collective pitch helicopters if you fly collective pitch helicopters don't enable this if you don't fly collective pitch helicopters it gets rid of one of the screens that only applies to collective pitch helicopters you want lua enabled and that's about it for now this is my time to do a deep dive so having set that up i'm then going to click file and download and that will give me the option to download the latest firmware for my radio so i'll hit download firmware it'll offer to save that firmware to my hard drive i've already i've already got it saved so i'm just going to say yes and it'll download and save it now if i'm changing my firmware version the other thing i definitely need to do is hit download sd contents and that's going to open up a folder here which has the correct sd card contents for the version of opentx that i am currently working with uh and you'll see here there's three zip files 0025 026 and 0029 the radio will tell you when you first power up if you have the wrong sd card contents and if it tells you that then you just need to go to that go to this folder and download the correct one and put that on your sd card i'll show you that at the end of the video so we've got the firmware file that we want to flash downloaded to the computer we're going to plug in usb again and again we're going to choose usb storage and again those hard drives or those removable drives are going to pop up we're just going to close those but we do need them to be there the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to hit file no sorry the next thing i'm going to do is i'm going to hit read write read models and settings from radio this is a backup of your models and settings it's a good idea to do this anytime you just have a backup but especially if you're flashing the radio it's a good idea to have a backup and we can hit file save as and save that to somewhere on the hard drive having done that having backed up the radio then i'll hit read write write firmware to radio i'll get this dialog box which will show me the last firmware that i downloaded and offer to flash it if i want to i can hit load and i can go find a different firmware that i want to flash for whatever reason when i'm ready and i've got the right firmware loaded i'm going to hit right to tx and that's it the firmware is now updated now what i just did is exactly the same thing that i did when i held the trim switches in and flashed from the sd card i just did it via the pc instead of via the radio menu but what if you can't get the radio to power up at all what if it's just completely bricked it turns out there's a way to flash the radio it's similar to how you flash a flight controller you know how when you your flight controller you can't connect to it you can hold in the bootloader button and put the flight controller into dfu mode and then you can flash it even if it's like completely bricked well the radio also has a dfu mode and here's how you get it there's no bootloader button the way it works is anytime you plug the radio in when it is powered down it will go into bootloader mode so you see i plugged it in but i didn't get any removable drives or anything like that i just got the notification that something was connected at this point if you haven't done this before it's a good idea to download and run impulse rc driver fixer which is an app that fixes dfu drivers windows sometimes the dfu drivers are messed up if you don't have that already downloaded there's a link in the video description it's a good idea to just have that on your desktop somewhere because you're going to like not use it every day but you're going to use it a fair amount so go ahead and run impulse rc driver fixer i'll do that as well and it will install the dfu driver and fix the driver when that finishes we're going to do read write write firmware to radio now this is the exact same dialog box that we saw before but the last time we were flashing with the removable drives connected now we're going to flash in dfu mode and you're going to see it's a little bit different when flashing in dfu mode we get this dialog box but the basic process is the same we're flashing the radio the difference is that this will work even if the radio won't even power on another difference with flashing in dfu mode versus flashing from the sd card or via the removable drive is that flashing in dfu mode also updates the bootloader on the radio that usually doesn't matter because usually when you go to a new firmware version you don't need a new bootloader version but occasionally they'll add some new feature to the bootloader so it's a good idea it's a good idea to flash it in dfu mode every once in a while just because it updates the bootloader while that finishes up let me address one thing that's going to affect some people when you run impulse rc driver fixer sometimes it says too many dfu devices if you have a flight controller and your radio plugged in at the same time it won't know which driver to fix so you need to have only one dfu device plugged into your computer at a time the other thing is sometimes you get that error message for like just for no apparent reason and the way that i fix it is if you're plugged into the front of the computer try plugging into the back if you're plugged into the left side of your laptop try plugging into the right side if you're plugged into a usb hub unplug from the hub and plug directly into the computer and if there is anything else plugged into the computer other than like a keyboard and a mouse unplug it and make sure that the controller is the only thing that's plugged in when you run impulse rc driver fixer if you get that error too many dfu devices found after you've finished flashing you'll get this message warning file has no dfu suffix don't worry it always says that it doesn't mean anything don't freak out your flash is done and complete your radio is hopefully restored back to function there's one more thing i said i'd show you before i finished up the video and that is how to update the firmware or update the sd card contents so i told you that you'd need to download one of these zip files and to do this it's really best to take the sd card out of the radio because if you do it through the usb port on the radio it's super slow and it takes forever whereas an sd card reader is going to be a lot faster what you're going to do is insert the sd card into the computer and then i want you to format the sd card if you have any custom sound files any custom graphics or anything like that like model images you're going to want to pull those off the sd card and save them for after you update so after you've got everything you want to save off the sd card let's just format the sd card and we're going to format it as fat32 and then we're going to open the zip file that we just downloaded that contains the new sd card contents we're going to open the formatted sd card in another window and we're just going to drag all that stuff over that's going to take a minute but then you'll have the correct sd card contents so you don't get that error message when you first turn the radio on there you go three ways to update the firmware of your open tx radio one way the quick and dirty way where you just flash from the sd card one way where you flash via pc or computer using the removable drive method and the final way which is where you flash using the dfu method that last way is the nuclear option it'll get your radio back from the dead but it involves hassling with drivers and that's why a lot of people you may not have known that way existed but now you do and hopefully you can save your radio or somebody else's radio someday if and when it ever comes to that that's gonna do it for this video thank you so much for watching tell me down in the tell me down in the comments which one did you know all three of those or was one of them nudia which one did you already know which one's new let me know if i was right or if you already knew all three of them and this whole video was a total waste of time thanks for watching happy flying what are you still doing here the video is over do you watch all the videos all the way to the end wow you are a super fan thank you that mean actually helps the channel a lot when you watch the videos all the way and youtube loves that you know what else youtube loves when you subscribe or when you 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