I like Ethos!

[Wayne]

OK - I know I am not an unbiased source, but I would like to share my experience with setting up my first advanced glider with Ethos. Yes, I have played a bit here and there with Ethos, and jumped into our sample radio many times to answer tech questions, but I personally had not programmed a plane with Ethos until yesterday. And most of my testing had been an earlier version of Ethos.

From time to time customers come into the shop and ask us for help, and in this case we had a customer that was brand new to FrSky and also setting up his first high performance slope glider. Normally if this was an OpenTX radio I would grab a copy of one of my glider programs and copy that onto the customers radio and tune that program to the customers plane. Still a time consuming process, but saves a lot of time working with OpenTX.

The customer did a great job of getting channels assigned correctly and moving in the right direction, and he had basic flap operation (they moved downward with a switch). This was my starting point.

• First off added triple rates for the elevator and ailerons (with voice prompts) with the mid rate being set to the suggested throws, EASY.
• Added aileron differential to the correct amount, EASY.
• Now let's get these flaps working correctly and with elevator compensation and spoilerons for full braking, this is a lot of work in OpenTX. Turned out to be VERY EASY, best I have seen in any radio.

In Ethos I saw a mix option for Butterfly, so added that mix and set it up, WOW!! That was SUPER EASY. Literally took me a few minutes to dial in the mixes to the suggested settings, and added a custom curve to bring in the flaps to how I like them, and compensate for some geometry imbalance in the mechanical setup on this particular plane. All I can say is WOW!! I think we spent maybe an hour doing all of this, and that included explaining things to the customer and working out some issues with the build. If I was to start from fresh in OpenTX I think this would take me most of a night to get it setup to these level.

As a comparison, if this was FrOS, I would not have even attempted to setup the radio for this complex of a plane. Never liked FrOS.

In summary I am really impressed with Ethos, the goals of an easier yet still very powerful radio programming environment has been achieved! I'll warn you, don't try this yourself, or you will find yourself wanting to buy a new Ethos radio for yourself. I know I have said it before, but I'm going to say it again: "VERY NICE!"

 

[Konrad]

That's great.

Now I have to ask why did the customer need help? Was he just unaware of what was needed or available with a 6 servo glider? This level of help you provided, would have been needed regardless of the radio program?

 

[Wayne]

Yes, this is his first full composite build and I think his first flapped glider. We always encourage folks doing something new to stop by the shop before the first flight to get another set of eyes on it.

 

[Konrad]

That's the kind of customer service I love from Aloft and crew. I've used it a few times myself.

 

[HENNY]

Yes Wayne the X20S is very nice. I like it also , but it is still early days, however there is nothing I cant do with Ethos. The only short coming is that Yaapu has not yet written the Lua scrip for Ethos.

 

[Pilotpete]

I'm really getting to enjoy Ethos on my X20s. To me, one thing that really stands out is how stoopid simple setting up a free or canned mix is!
In the past, I've struggled with getting mixes to work correctly in my prior two Futabas and my X10s, running FrOs
Once you get to know where things are in Ethos, things get real easy.

I do have one question though. Why, when selecting a 2 aileron servo wing, does Ethos reverse one of the two channels? Ailerons normally require servos to run in the same direction on channel. I noticed that when you setup a two servo elevator tail, this does not happen, even though it is so common to have to reverse one elevator servo, due to linkage geometry.
Pete

 

[Hill Hobbit]

Even easier for slopers now Mike Shellim has ported his OpenTx template to Ethos. Yay!

 

[Wayne]

I do have one question though. Why, when selecting a 2 aileron servo wing, does Ethos reverse one of the two channels? Ailerons normally require servos to run in the same direction on channel. I noticed that when you setup a two servo elevator tail, this does not happen, even though it is so common to have to reverse one elevator servo, due to linkage geometry.
Pete

Really depends on the model you are setting up, but in my experience it is pretty common to reverse one servo on the ailerons, and on a v-tail one rudder or one elevator will be reversed. There is no standard as everyone builds their planes a bit differently. It is easy to reverse a servo in Ethos.