When I got my first drone I could not get it to arm and nearly lost my mind during two afternoons trying to piece together a bunch of information which finally liberated me and got me into the FPV drone club. If you look around the internet you will find a lot of information telling you why your drone won’t turn on, but the problem is it is mostly talking about things you have already tried like making sure your battery is charged or that your drone is powered on. If you are tired of troubleshooting and want a guide that makes sense then look no further.
We will be discussing three main problems with multiple solutions, and while there are an infinite amount of problems to experience in the FPV drone world, we are certain you are facing one of these situations with your drone and it is keeping you from actually enjoying the hobby.
What To Do If Your Drone Is Not Binding
Let’s say you got your shiny new drone out of the box, put the propellers on (bad idea to put them on right away – safety), charged your batteries and tried figuring out how to bind your drone but have failed miserably. No problem, everyone has been there and we know how frustrating it can be, but don’t worry you’ll have tons of other problems when you overcome this one, and then when you finally get to fly you’ll just crash a lot. It gets better with time, but you have a long way to go before you become a proficient pilot. With that in mind, and assuming you have not given up on yourself yet, let’s dive into how you can bind your drone to your radio.
Step 1: Locate the bind button on your drone
If the bind button is not screaming “HEY I’M RIGHT HERE!” since it usually is hidden, you will want to find your handy-dandy manual and flip around the pages until you get to the section where it talks about the boards and their layout and where the bind button can be found. We have included an example above of a drone manual where it shows the bind button’s location.
To locate the bind button on your drone, you will want to know that it can be in two places: the main board (FC – Flight Controller) or on the receiver (small board wired to main board and has an antenna attached).
HELPFUL HINT: You are binding your radio and drone, but you are going to press the bind button on the receiver unless you have a very compact drone in which case it is typically soldered onto the main board. If you cannot find the bind button on the main board, it is probably on a separate board somewhere near the tail end of the drone, with an antenna wired to it, and it will be extremely small.
Step 2: Figure out how to get your radio into binding mode
Once you locate that pesky bind button you will want to dig deep in your radio settings to find how it turns binding mode to ON. In our example, the Radiomaster TX16S, we simply go into model setup and scroll to the bottom where we select our radio protocol that we want to use. Here we see the “Bind” option and all we have to do is select it to turn the radio into binding mode.
In general, it is a good idea to reference your radio’s manual to get proper instructions on how to turn binding mode on. It will be an option within the radio’s menu, but it can also be a physical button on the radio especially in the case of external modules.
Assuming you got one of the popular radios it will be the same for you, so again if you cannot figure it out get into your radio’s manual and get flippin’ until you get to the right page and absorb the knowledge.
Step 3: Verify that the radio supports the protocol that your drone’s receiver is using
There are many protocols used in the FPV drone hobby, and fortunately for you many of the radios support multiple protocols. This does not mean that your radio will automatically choose the correct protocol, and so you have some more knowledge to gain here by understanding the relationship between radio, protocol, and drone receiver.
You can verify that your radio and drone receiver use the same protocol by, once again, referring to your manual for both devices. The manuals should state clearly, like the picture above, which receiver and protocol comes on the drone and which protocols are supported by your radio.
Looking at the image above, we see that the this specific drone uses a receiver called “EMAX SPI Receiver” BUT it is compatible with FrSky D8 mode. With this knowledge we are able to move forward knowing that our TX16S radio support the FrSky D8 Mode.
Step 4: Power on both the radio and drone
I will admit, this is one of the obvious steps I warned you about in the beginning of this post, but sometimes when we have been troubleshooting for hours we can start to make silly mistakes. Now that you know your radio and drone will actually work, and you have found the bind button on the drone as well as the method which enables binding mode on your radio, you are ready to bind the two devices together.
Verify that you have fully charged battery packs and connect them to your radio and drone. The radio will need to be powered on after you plug the battery in, but the drone will turn on right away as soon as you plug the battery into it. Verify that they are both powered on and move to the next step.
Step 5: Press the bind button on your drone
The order of bind buttons does not matter much, but the duration can vary drastically. More often than not a drone will be in binding mode much longer than a radio and so it is best to start with the drone. Finish reading the set of steps before you continue because you will only have a few seconds to do all of this in tandem.
Step 6: Turn your radio into binding mode
Now that your drone is in binding mode, you have to turn your radio into binding mode. It is a good idea to leave the radio set up in a manner that allows you to simply press ONE button to trigger binding mode on the radio right after you press the bind button on your drone.
With your drone in binding mode, enable binding more on your radio and move to the next step.
Step 7: Wait at least 2 minutes before you do anything else
THIS STEP IS VERY IMPORTANT!!!
Some drones will download data into your radio or update certain things and this can take time, and THERE ARE NO INDICATORS that this is happening. If you have done everything correctly up until this point your drone and radio WILL bind, but it might take a minute (literally a minute) or two. BE PATIENT.
If your radio and drone have stopped their binding mode beeping you are probably good to go, but you can verify that your radio and drone have been successfully bound by looking at your radio and seeing if you have any signal. The signal looks like the bars on your cellphone showing you how much signal you have from the towers.
If you DO NOT have signal then something went wrong in the previous steps or your drone has an actual problem with its receiver as the radios do not tend to have many issues.
Try binding again by turning everything off and on again, waiting a minute to see if it binds this time around, and if nothing happens you can turn both devices back onto binding mode and see if that resolves your issues.
What To Do If Your Drone Is Bound To The Radio But Will Not Arm
If you have successfully bound your drone and radio together, welcome to level 2. Things get very interesting here and there can be multiple reasons why your drone and radio are linked together but will still not cooperate with each other. At this point we will be working in a program used to configure many settings for the drone while it is connected to a computer. The program is called Betaflight. If you have never heard of it, you will definitely be able to make progress on your issues with this section of the post. You can find the program for Mac or Windows at their website. If you want to skip straight into the install because who cares about doing research just get me in the air, then click the install link to get going.
Did you configure your arm switch in Betaflight?
If you have no idea what I’m even talking about, then you will definitely need to read these next few lines slowly. When you bind a drone and radio together, there are more settings you need to configure before you can fly your shiny new toy around and crash into anything and everything.
Before you can turn your drone on and fly, you will have to configure an ARM switch and map it to a switch on your radio, and yes you can choose whichever button or switch on your radio you want. The ARM switch allows your propellers to start spinning and releases full control of the drone to you upon checking on a couple of things:
- Throttle threshold – Throttle is below min check/ low threshold so your drone does not disappear into the skies instantly
- Degree – Your drone is on a flat surface, as in it will go up when you give thrust and not forward
If you want more information on how to configure your switches, check out our post How To Bind and Set Up An FPV Drone – Explained Simply and look in the “Configure Switches In Betaflight” section
Check Which Flags Come Up In Betaflight
In a perfect world you did everything correctly and are simply missing one piece of information that is keeping your drone grounded. The next best place to check for flags or reasons or errors as to why your drone’s software is not letting it arm is, again, in Betaflight. There is a section in the Setup menu, under the Info section called “Arming Disable Flags” that shows you which flags are active and keeping your drone from arming.
You can click the Wiki button above the flags section to decipher the meaning behind the codes. Rest assured that it is more than likely something simple, especially if you have not yet flown and crashed your drone.
Your Throttle Cannot Go Lower Than The Stick Low Threshold
While this is a rare situation, it is absolutely a possibility you can easily overlook given the amount of configurations possible within Betaflight and on radios and drones combined. In the Receiver menu in Betaflight, you will see a section named “Stick Low Threshold”. Here you will see a number that directly relates to your throttle.
If you look at the Throttle (T) bar on the left which is the lowest at 885, you can see that it is indeed LESS THAN 1050 which is the “Stick Low Threshold” or, in simpler terms, the lowest amount of throttle a drone can have before it will not arm.
IF YOUR RADIO’S THROTTLE GIMBAL CANNOT GO LOWER THAN 1050 YOU WILL HAVE TO RAISE THE THRESHOLD TO A HIGHER NUMBER.
One other thing to point out here is that you will want to have your radio on and bound to your drone in order to manipulate the throttle bar and see where it lands at the lowest point.
You will want your throttle, before you hit the arm button, to be at the lowest possible point AND below the stick low threshold in order to successfully arm your drone.
Your Radio and/or Drone’s Channel Mappings Are Wrong (AETR vs EATR vs TAER)
Your drone and radio have channel mappings which basically tell the drone what to do when a gimbal is pushed in a certain way. On top of this you have channels for your switches like arm, beeper, mode, failsafe etc.
If your drone is not arming and you have a flag saying something about your throttle, you will want to head into the “Receiver” menu in Betaflight. Here you will find a section, shown in the image above in red, called “Channel Map” where you can see how your drone is set up to receive instructions from your radio.
The problem here is that your radio will come set up a certain way, for example AETR and your drone can come configured with TAER. So what even are these letters, you might ask?
A – Aileron – Controls the Roll which can be seen in Betaflight on the left side Roll (A).
E – Elevator – Controls the pitch
T – Throttle – Controls the amount of thrust
R – Rudder – Controls the yaw movements.
If you do not know what pitch and yaw and roll and thrust is you can do some more research on that before you continue as it is critical you understand that.
In general, you will want your channel mappings to match on your drone on your radio. If your radio is set up for AETR, and you want to fly with that configuration, make sure your drone is set up with AETR in Betaflight as well.
This will align the gimbals/channels correctly and prevent you from getting what is showing in the image above where your throttle gimbal/channel is incorrectly controlling the pitch thus keeping your throttle at 1498 and keeping it above the Stick Low Threshold thus preventing you from arming your drone.
What To Do If Your Drone Arms But Is Not Flying Correctly
Now let’s say you can actually arm your drone and get the propellers moving but you want your drone to gain some altitude and instead of just flips over, or you’re flying and want to turn left but it goes to the right. There are a few reasons for this and we will start with the simplest one: the propellers.
Are Your Propellers Installed In The Correct Order?
Installing your propellers is not as simple as getting them out of the plastic bag and putting them on as you please. Each drone, and each propeller on a drone for that matter, is set to spin in a certain direction and the only way to do this is by using Betaflight or referring to your drone’s manual. You will see which way your propellers are supposed to spin. If we take a look at a manual you can see what I mean.
Furthermore we can look in Betaflight to do it the quick way if you have it installed and ready to go, although it is still a great idea to find and download your drone’s manual for future reference.
If you go into Betaflight and select the “Motors” menu you will see right away a diagram showing which way your propellers are supposed to spin.
Make sure to take note of how a drone’s propellers actually move as well, since there is a specific design to them which allow them to push air properly. Typically the thicker, or more blunt, side of the propeller will be the one which dictates the direction.
Are Your Channels Mapped Correctly?
While we cover the channel mappings on a previous section, if you have been training to fly with roll on the left and yaw on the right, this can easily throw you off similarly to riding a bicycle with a backwards handle bar. Make sure you understand what AETR and other variations actually means.
AETR, for example, means that Roll, Pitch, Yaw, and Throttle are channels 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively. This can also change if your radio is set to use a specific mapping like TAER. This could cause you to lose total control of your drone and possibly lose it, so make sure your settings are correct before you go flying and start out at a low altitude in case you cannot control your drone effectively until you know with 100% certainty your channels are mapped correctly.
Do You Know What You Are Doing?
Finally, if you have rushed into this expecting to learn on the fly you will have a difficult time. Flying a drone is extremely difficult and will take you hours before you can comfortably fly in circles and land and take off without crashing.
If you have trained on a simulator, make sure you learned to fly with the same mappings that your drone is using so if your throttle and roll are on the left, and pitch and yaw on the right make sure you keep them the same when you fly your drone.
Switching the channel mappings and expecting to fly the same is not going to happen. Merely changing which side your roll is on will make you feel like you are flying for the first time all over again.
