Servo not responding to input

[denick75]

I am trying to add smoke to the E-flight Apprentice. I've programmed channel 7, transmitter switch A for this function. When I load a plane that already has smoke, such as Yak (3D), the A switch works, and when looking at servo in the editor, I can see the Current Output responds to a flipping of the switch. But when I then load the Apprentice plane, the servo's Current Output no longer changes with the switch. It seems like the command from the transmitter is not being mapped to the servo even when the servo Input is set to Receiver Channel 7. Even when I just add a servo on channel 7, I see it respond to the switch when I'm editing the Yak, but not when editing the Apprentice. So the problem is not with the Smoke servo, it's any servo assigned to channel 7. When I go to the Radio tab in the editor, same thing occurs - the Current Value for Output Channel 7 responds to the switch with the Yak, but not with the Apprentice.

See attached for photos of the smoke module, servo, and radio settings.

Does anyone have any suggestions? PLEASE and THANK YOU for taking the time to respond.

Also, while I'm at it here - is there any actual documentation about the plane editor? The RealFlight user manual is largely useless in this respect.

THANKS,

Joe

 

[Ryan Douglas]

@denick75, unfortunately your screenshots don't show one critical piece of the puzzle which I believe happens to be the place that needs tweaking.

In the editor's Radio pane, under Output Channel 7, you've shown the Input's "Input Feed When" value, which is set to "Always". That is correct for what you intend to do. But what does the Input itself look like? Specifically, what is the value of its "Input Channel" property? This is what you should set to Receiver Channel 7 in the setup you've shown above. That means it will be driven by your radio's channel 7 output, because in your software radio for that model (the editor's "Radio" pane), you have configured Output Channel 7 to be driven by the switch you want controlling smoke (channel #7 from your radio*).

You have also configured low rates to be active when channel 7 is below 0 (its midpoint). That is probably not what you want. I'm guessing you were trying to set that as the actual input and just did it in the wrong place.

Out of curiosity, what controller/radio are you using?

There is not a detailed manual for the aircraft editor. You can learn a lot by examining how stock models are set up, and feel free to ask questions here as needed. Also, here is a somewhat lengthy post where I discuss some related things. I think it will aid your understanding (though the first part about whether to use the software radio is less pertinent).

I hope that helps!


*The software radio's Output Channel numbers and the channel numbers of the inputs assigned to them from your radio are not required to match! For example, a basic airplane with 4 control surfaces and a Spektrum flight controller might only need 5 total channels for full control. One possible way to set that up is with 5 Output Channels, numbered 1-5, where 1-4 accept the radio output channels 1-4 as their inputs and then Output Channel 5 accepts, say, radio channel 8 as the flight modes input. Also, a single Output Channel in the software radio can have more than one input, though that gets more advanced.

 

[denick75]

I figured it out. Steam was sending its controller profile to RealFlight so I disabled that in Steam and now it's working fine. I did have it set up correctly but some function in Steam was overriding what I was doing in RealFlight. Thanks a ton for your help, I learned a lot from your reply even though it didn't directly solve my issue.

I am using the Spektrum NX8 transmitter.

 

[Ryan Douglas]

Ah! Well kudos for figuring that out (though I'm not sure how it worked for one model and not another in that case...). I'm glad the information above was still beneficial.