betaflight — custom motor ordering made easy

Have you ever assembled your quadcopter motors in the wrong order? I am quite sure you did! I am going to show you how to swap motors in betaflight without the need of a soldering iron! This tutorial is based on betaflight 3.0/3.1 and betaflight configurator 1.8.9.

I have spent a lot of time reordering either the motor control wires or hacking custom mmix comands into the CLI to swap single motors. This is easy to get wrong, especially when you are hacking together your newest quadcopter all night long and just want this thing to fly. I hacked together a small helper for that: All you need to know is which motor slider makes which motor spin.

First of all: Remove the propellers!

Second: Make sure the motor directions are set up properly, if not use the blheli configurator to invert those motors or swap two out of the three motor wires.

Now go to the motor tab and enable the motors. Move slider by slider and write down which motor slider spins which motor position. When done, select those motor slider ids in the following sheet. Please note that this is for a typical X setup as shown in the picture.

For example when you pushed the slider for motor one and the upper right motor started to spin you simply select “1” in the upper right input box. Do the rest for all your motors, copy the code below and enter it into the CLI and save the settings. That’s it!

CLI commands:

With the propellers still removed arm your quad and move it around. When you tilt the quad to one side, the motors on that should start to spin faster. Repeat it with all four directions and verify the correct operation before taking your quad for a ride.