How to setup a Taranis, Acro Naze32, and Telemetry

by kah00na | September 17, 2014 | (5) Posted in How To

The Taranis receiver paired with a Naze32 and a D4R-II receiver can do telemetry without any special modifications to the hardware.  Telemetry allows your receiver to monitor statistics provided by our multirotor through the receiver.  The D4R-II receiver is able to understand FrSky telemetry output by the Naze32 board.  The trick is getting it hooked up and configured correctly.  I started my multirotor flying with a Turnigy 9X and an on-board low voltage alarm.  The biggest downfall to that setup is when you are flying FPV and flying out of ear shot of the quad, the alarm could go off and you may not hear it.  Also, it was difficult to know if you were flying too far away since there was nothing measuring the signal strength. Telemetry on the Taranis provides answers to both of these issues.

The Taranis + D4R-II + Naze32 have several benefits:

1.  Out of the box support for telemetry

2.  CPPM - reducing the number of on-board wires

3.  RSSI signal monitoring

4.  Envy of your friends

Here's how to do it!

The first thing to do is to enable CPPM on your D4R-II. CPPM allows for all the channel signals to travel across one wire.  This reduces the overall number of wires on your multirotor making for a cleaner build.  Connect the included jumper across channel pins 3 & 4 on the D4R-II.

Connect a 3 wire servo lead from channel 1, (signal, positive, ground) on the D4R-II to the channel 1 (signal, positive, ground) on the Naze32.  Do not get the wires backward!

Connect the green and black wires from the side plug on the D4R-II to the FrSky telemetry pins on the Naze32 board.  You'll have to either solder on a servo lead or solder the wires directly to the board.  Again, connect signal to signal and ground to ground (you may not have to connect the ground.  I did and it works fine).

Connect your Naze32 to your computer via USB and open baseflight.  You'll need to verify the stick ranges are still stretching to their endpoints and the sticks are configured correctly, such as your throttle, rudder, ailerons, and elevator (not covered in this tutorial).  Also, the following commands need to be typed in the command line interface (CLI) to activate the required features:

  • feature vbat
  • feature ppm
  • feature telemetry
  • save

On your Taranis, on the "Telemetry" screen, in "Screen 1 Nums", In the first row of the three columns, add these values.  1st column = "Cels", 2nd Column = "Cell", 3rd Column = "RSSI"

Back on the main screen of the Taranis, hold the "Page" button and the screen will switch over to where the previously defined values are displayed.

The Taranis gives many more options including how to setup low voltage monitoring, weak RSSI signal strength, background music, and many other options.  Overall, the Taranis, with its built in support for telemetry, makes it shine brighter than other available receivers.

Fly it like you stole it!

COMMENTS

ronin457jc on May 10, 2015
hey, thanx, first one to show how set up the 3 spilt screens. not much info on that.. new taranis x9d plus, liking it more the more I set on it...
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Scott67 on August 11, 2015
Not sure if you have an X8R receiver that you could do a how to on setting this up on. I know the X8R has a smart port and i was wondering if it is the same as the port on the D4R receiver you used. any info or help on this would be very much appreciated
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How to setup a Taranis, Acro Naze32, and Telemetry