I’ve used the term “Vintage” as it seems anything older than six months in the drone world is considered Boomer territory.
I’m curious to know if anyone else has flashed a modern firmware build onto an old flight controller and what was the result, both good and bad.
I took delivery of another TBS Gemini yesterday. Originally the Gemini ran on Tau Labs, a fork of OpenPilot I believe, in fact my original Gemini has run on nothing else. This recent addition is running on Cleanflight and reading through the FPVlab thread on this subject the consensus of opinion is that CF, along with a reflash of the ESC’s to a newer FW, completely transformed the Gemini for the better. Along with this second Gemini were a mountain of spares including a custom Colibri flight controller. I have managed to flash BF 4.2 to it and upload a custom parameter file to reflect the Hex configuration and motor assignments. But before I transplant it into one of my working Gemini’s are there any recommendations before I spin the props and unleash the madness?
The migration of the TBS Gemini over to CF was a project executed by a few guys on FPVlab back in 2015 using the 1.9 developer version of CF. The latest version of CF I found that supported this was 3.0. The initial problem I encountered was that Taulabs used a different format than CF and BF for the target files and so neither CF or BF could access the bootloader on the Cobrillo board.
I was able to find a .bin target file of a CF 3.0 target that Taulabs would accept. This then allowed me to force the STM bootloader into DFU mode and subsequently install BF4. 2 onto the Cobrillo board.
Some of the entries in the parameter file I’d previously dumped prior to the 4.2 update errored out when I reuploaded it to the board due to syntax differences between CF and BF but initial props off tests appear to demonstrate that everything is good to go for a proper maiden later today.
Unfortunately I’ve also found out that one of the Esc’s on my original Gemini has failed. I haven’t a clue as to why and replacements are near none existent, TBS themselves no longer stock them and there’s none to be found in the UK. Luckily I have some, somwhere🤔, I purchased from RCGeeks when they were clearing stock a few years back.
These older RTF’s/ARF’s while being fun and unique are getting harder to keep in the air these days.
Just put a few packs through it and apart from a small tweak to compensate for the tilted motors it flew great, much better than on the Taulabs firmware. Very responsive and snappy.