Install Edge TX on Flysky PL18 and restore back to Flysky firmware guide

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Install Edge TX on Flysky PL18 and restore back to Flysky firmware guide

Software to back up Flysky Boot loader for using to restore Flysky firmware
https://www.st.com/en/development-tools/stm32cubeprog.html

Software to install Edge TX firmware/software
https://buddy.edgetx.org/

SD card pack
https://github.com/EdgeTX/edgetx-sdcard/releases

Risto Git hub guide
https://github.com/EdgeTX/edgetx/wiki/Flashing-EdgeTX-to-Flysky-PL18-or-Paladin-EV

TEMU affiliate link
https://temu.to/m/u5q1sbd14an

CNHL batteries discount code craig5%off
https://chinahobbyline.com/discount/craig5%25off?ref=Cnhlwtfrccars

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Are hi YouTube Welcome Back to WTFC cars so today I’m going to show you how to flash htx firmware onto the pl18 it’s a very similar process on the pl18 EV as well um there is a few limitations so you’ve only got 8 megabytes of memory to

Use as the SD card so you won’t be able to have the sound files um the pl18 doesn’t have audio rooted anyway so you’d have to modify it to get audio out of it so it’s not really that big of an issue um there’s also no real time clock battery in the

Pl18 so you’d have to Source One and sold it onto board there is tabs for it um there’s no multi output module in it and it won’t support the standard frm 301 um but it does support the 303 so you can attach that to back of your pl18

And you can use other modules as well and I think lastly the 8 megabyte of storage issue you can upgrade the actual chip so you can unsolder it’s only eight legs and you can solder a bigger chip in if you want give you more storage but I’ll take you through how to actually

Update it and then I’ll show you how to it back to Fly Sky I’ll put a link to the original guide that I’ve referenced on GitHub I think it’s risto I think wrote the original guide or updated it in December 2023 um but it’s quite a

Good guide there is a few steps missing out of it like when you select which device is the STM bootloader which I’ll add in my video um but it is pretty self-explanatory and uh yeah let’s bring you in for a close-up look and see how we go

Right so there’s a few things we’re going to need to do to prepare the transmitter for being updated firstly you need to remove the little rubber thing on this side that’s so we can get to the dfu button and the hard reset then you going to have to flip

Your transmitter over and remove the transmission module so if you got the little alloy plate there’s the two screws and then you just press button and release it then we want a fully wired micro USB lead connected but don’t connect that to the computer at the moment and if we just power this

Up we can see we’re on standard Fly Sky firmware and if I remember where it is on this one if we go in and have a look we’re on 1072 standard so once we’ve got the transmitter ready we can power that back down then we need to go over to PC and create

A few folders so for me I’ve got me assistant V3 folder and then a pl18 folder where I’ve got the backup of the memories from the pl18 so you want to create a folder for your boot loader and then I find it hand to create a folder for the STM

Software so once we’ve got these we need to open one of the links that I’ve put in the description and this is to the stm32 programmer software so once you get on here you can click get software get the one relevant to what you’re running so I’m going to go for 64bit

Version you have to accept the terms and for me because I’ve already made an account on here it will let me download it if you haven’t got an account it’ll ask you to create one or you can create a guest one basically you just have to

Put your user um put your email address and details it’ll send you an email and you just verify it and you’ll be able to download the software so once we got the software installed you’re going to extract it it’s probably better if you have WinRAR installed we can delete that we don’t need

It then you just need to double click on the software get a quick UAC prompt and then we’ll get splash screen and we just need to click through and get the software installed and you don’t have to click anything special with the options on that just use what’s

Provided you will get another box click up and we just need to let it install so you can change any at defaults where you want it to save or anything I’m just going to run it completely as stock now you will get these two little icons up on your desktop if you’ve selected

The option for them so all I’m going to do is just drag them into that folder so we know where they are you’ve got the software installed so we don’t need it anymore we can delete that and just keep the programmer and the package Creator so next step is to get our

Actual transmitter into a bootable mode so the software can read it so what you’re going to do so we’re going to press and hold the dfu button down you’re going to get your USB cable and connect it to the PC you should hear the PC make a sound that it’s detected the

Transmitter then we’re going to open the actual programmer and first time you open it you’ll get a prompt come up so we can just click on that you’ll get then get the program Open we want to select USB from the dropdown menu and then make sure we’ve got USB

Connected then we should be able to click connect basically you’re looking for the flash size uh that it’s the cortex M4 once we’ve got that detected we need to read out the actual file that’s the uh Fly Sky firmware so once we’ve got the radio actually

Detected we can check and make sure the address is correct and then we just need to change the actual size that we’re looking at so if we set that to 0x2 and then 0 00000000 0 and then what we’re looking to do is read the actual flash so we’re basically

Just reading the parts that is the boot loader once we’ve got this red we can save as into his bootloader backup file and basically you can rename this to anything you like um the actual original guide that I found on GitHub advisors name it to pl1 18fa factory.

Bin which makes a lot of sense then we want to save that so once we’ve got that saved we can go into his folder make sure it’s about two Meg file that’s what you’re looking for then we can disconnect from his transmitter and then you can go to your

Windows eject menu and eject the stm32 boot loader it’ll tell you it’s safe to disconnect you can press the hard reset disconnect your USB and if you try and power it back up you should get the Fly Sky software back on so we’ll power that down next what

We’re going to be looking to do is update it to htx so we can close this software then we’re going to be going to budy EDG tx.org so I’ll put the link for this one in as well so once we’re on here you want to include pre-release select the latest release

Wait for it to populate the model So Fly Sky pl18 we now need to press our dfu button keep it in and connect our USB again you should then hear Windows connect and you’ll make it’ll make the noise that it’s detecting the actual transmitter then we can go to flash via

USB now if you don’t see the stm32 boot loader here you can go to add new device and just scroll up and down and it will show up as stm32 bootloader you can just click on that and click connect and it will add it into this menu if it

Already says connect or if you’ve added it you just need to highlight it and click next then it’s going to tell you that you’re flashing the firmware htx latest version and you’re flashing it to the radio so you can select start flashing it’ll quickly download it’s erasing the actual

Firmware chip on the transmitter itself and all this time you’ll see nothing on the transmitter at all it just remains blank then we get to writing the new firmware and there are a number of limitations with the stock Hardware um from what I’ve found so there’s no battery for the realtime clock which

There is the soar pads and everything on the board in the pla so you can solder that in um there’s also no direct route for audio because Fly Sky use a pre-programmed chip to deal with the actual audio itself um you can do a mod to re-root

The audio um the onboard flash memory is only 8 megabytes so you’ve not got a lot of storage um so as we go through this I’ll show show you there’s not really any room for the sound files or anything anyway you can upd upgrade the flash chip there’s only eight legs to solder

So it’s not that difficult um but this is just a quick guide showing you how to get the actual stock firmware on there and please don’t power down your radio or anything while it’s doing this else you will Breck it and then you’ve got to go through trying to Unbreak Your

Radio which is a very similar process if you get an error where it says it can’t erase the actual chip uh when it’s trying to flash this it’s worth going through Fly Sky assistant update your transmitter to the same firmware version that I’ve got um and then reput it into dfu mode and

Retry this part and it will go through for you um it will one of issues I had when I were first trying this out I do like to try not to skip any of these bits in case you’re following along wondering how long it takes or

You think can I unplug it no leave it doesn’t actually take that long in grand scheme of things so we’re almost done so once you’ve got to 100% it’ll tell you it flashing is done you can then click set up SD card so if we get the actual

Transmitter now what I would do is press the software reset button disconnect your transmitter plug it back into USB and power the transmitter back on you’ll get a storage warning bad or missing Radio Data that’s absolutely fine so we can just click through that and then we want to click USB

Storage you’ll come up with a warning saying you need to format drive on your PC so you can just format it leave everything as stock and this is basically because we’re repurposing the flash flash chip as an SD so we can see it’s picking it up as

Usbg now you can download the actual files or you can stay on this page select SD select Drive G click View files are you sure it’s your D Cod yes so again include pre-release select the latest select your transmitter apply changes you can click on details to see what it’s actually doing

If you do get the sound data options don’t click on it because it won’t fit on your uh storage so depending on which version you click you can get sound data showing up here and you get different language packs if you don’t click on any of them

It won’t try and install any of them but there are available links on uh on this site where you can download all this yourself and manually copy it over but once that’s finished we can close out of everything you should then be able to power cycle your transmitter so we can

Unplug our USB cable so it’ll run you through calibration so to start it we can start calibration you just need to Center all your pots all your levers and everything then move them to the extremes just to allow it to calibrate the full movement and there you have it you’ve got your

Functioning htx software and you can go through and set everything up and do whatever you want to do in htx so the next issue we’ve got is once you’ve got it set up like this how do you put it back to normal so let’s work you through that one

So we’re going to press and hold our dfu button we’re going to plug in our USB let go of the dfu button then we’re going to open up the STM software so once we got the software open you want to click on this icon we’re going to browse to where we

Saved as bootloader so so as factory. bin we’ve got that now loaded up we can connect via USB make sure we’re seeing the correct controller and for this one I like to tell it to verify programming afterwards and we can start programming it’s now erasing the actual flash chip on the pl18

And again this entire time you’ll not have anything to see on the pl8 itself but this is why we need to back up the actual boot loader first so it should now be sending our Fly Sky original bootloader back to the l18 once you do have uh htx software on

You can browse the uh internal memory just by connecting the controller and selecting USB mode so you can change all the htx files and everything you can add to it delete clear space whatever you need to do the space is limited on the pl18 so it says it’s all

Verified so you will have a message saying downloaded and verified there you’ll also get a file download complete so once we okay them you can disconnect close the soft software and if you go to your windows USB you can safely eject the stm32 bootloader then you need to press the hard

Reset and we can disconnect our USB from PC we can power up the transmitter and it should say Fly Sky splash screen and then we need to restore the firmware so if you click okay on that and then we plug in our USB you then want to open your Fly Sky assistant

Software and I will cut this bit out because um yeah the assistant software is not the speediest of Creations so you you’ll get a box saying you connec to a server for about 10 to 15 minutes sometimes sometimes it’s a little bit quicker but uh I’ll wait till that’s

Connected and then we’ll carry on so once the software loads you can see the device online and we just need to click update firmware click as update choose whichever firm where you want press continue and then it’ll start re-update updating the actual firmware it’s quite quick to download it’s pretty

Slow to actually put it on the uh transmitter itself but once it’s downloaded it will then start reapplying your full firmware to the actual pl18 and at this time you’ll just get the screen saying do not operate remote uh during firmware update so we’re at 1% now and I’m sure you

Don’t want to sit there watching our slow this is to install so I’ll cut to the last bit so at this point we’re at 96% right in the firway back it does take a while so just bear with it it’s not the uh fastest thing but once this is done you should

Would have a uh fully operable pl18 on Fly Sky firmware again nice to be able to swap back and forth between the two if you want to Tinker with it so you will see the transmitter go off then it’ll start up on the Fly Sky firmware if we click

Refresh it’s going to moan at me cuz I hav put module back in that it should restart and you should have your model Memories Back on if you haven’t you can just click in to import load TX and you can just go back to where you’ve got the actual model memory

Stored that’s pl1 18 I’ve done plenty of other videos on how you uh back up your memories but because we copied the flash the memories are already on mine but you can just take the ones you want click add and then okay and it’ll just write your model Memories

Back And as always when you updating firm where it’s worth running through calibration just to make sure all your dials and your sticks are calibrated again at least copying the memories over doesn’t really take very long so you just need to go through your calibration make sure everything’s centered move everything to its

Maximum and then when you back out should say calibration successful and then you can carry on using your Fly Sky transmitter just poke the uh rub a bit back on and you just need to reattach your transmission module but that’s just a quick guide to show

You how to modify it to htx and how to put it back to Fly Sky firmware so let’s wrap this one up so there you have it that’s how you install htx on the pl18 not sure how much use it’ be on an unmodified pl18 but at least you know how to

Install it and how to revert it back it is quite important that you make a backup of your boot loader because you’re not going to be able to restore it back to Fly Sky firmware if you’re heavily modifying it upgrading the Chip And that you probably don’t want to

Restore it back anyway um but I have put a link to all the software that I’ve used and the original guide so credit to the guys that RIT the original guide for it and the open TX um firmware guys they’ve done a great job of getting it

Working on the pl18 um as I say not really sure how much use it’s going to be but if you’re looking at this mod and you just want a guide to let you know how to do it so you can revert it that’s kind of what I’ve done this for um if

You’re looking at getting htx on something you’re quite Hands-On in modifying stuff anyway so you know what you’re looking for but thanks again for watching WTF RC cars if you like this kind of content don’t forget to like And subscribe hit the notification Bell share to friends and family and uh catch

You guys again in the next One