Good day! Just a few weeks ago I did a video on Fat Shark's firmware update for the digital FPV
Shark Byte system. Well, Fat Shark's done it again. Today, we've got another Shark
Byte firmware update. This time with Canvas Mode Shark. Byte just keeps getting better!
I'll explain what's new in this Shark Byte firmware update, how to accomplish the update,
and do a quick demo of Shark Byte firmware update results. Let's see what this canvas
mode can really do! Make sure to hit that thumbs up button below and subscribe to your
TMac FPV channel - your home for your journey the better FPV fun flights and racing stuff!
So, what exactly is Canvas Mode? Basically, it's how your Shark Byte system interacts
with your flight controller Betaflight firmware to communicate with your OSD.
It allows the display of just about all of the OSD elements currently in use by analog systems
and the ability to interact with them in the same way as you can with analog systems
and I'll demo that here shortly. So, how do you get it? Well, just go to the Shark Byte site
which I'll link to in the video description below. From here, you're going to want to download three
things. The first one is the user manual which IU highly recommend you read through and we'll
be using for our Shark Byte firmware update. Save it to a folder you've made on your computer. Next,
you'll want to download the firmware zip file for the Shark Byte video receiver module or VRX
and you'll want to save that to a folder on your computer and extract the files from the zip file.
Note you have five different files here.
The last thing you'll need to download is the firmware zip file for the type of Shark Byte
video transmitter you have. Notice you have three options here now - the double stack 500mw VTX,
the single PCB 200mw VTX, or this new VTX coming out called the single PCB
200 milliwatt race VTX. Since the process is the same for all three and I'm using the single
PCB 200 milliwatt VTX that's the firmware zip file I'm going to download.
We're going to put that in our VTX folder we've created for that revision
and extract its files.
Note for the VTX we only have one. Now we want to go to our user manual that we just downloaded
and go to page 14 and follow the instructions for our firmware update. Before you start the update
make sure your battery for your Shark Byte receiver module has a pretty good charge on
it because the firmware update can take several minutes and you don't want your module powering
down during the update. Now we're going to take this SD card out of our video receiver module,
plug it into our USB to SD card adapter,
and connect it to our computer. Then we take the file we've unzipped for our VTX firmware
on our hard drive and copy it
onto the root directory of the SD card we've taken out of our receiver module.
Once it's copied over, now we put the SD card back into the VRX module
and we follow the instructions on our user manual. We connect the VRX
to the VTX in our quad with the provided cable
then we power on the VRX module and watch for the word success to be shown on our video display.
Firmware update successfully, re-power VRX. Now so we can unplug that. Now to update our VRX module
firmware we don't need this cable anymore so we can disconnect the cable from the VRX module.
Set that aside. Grab our SD card from the
module and go back to our computer and follow a similar process.
We take the five files we've extracted from our zip file for the VRX module . . .
one, two, three, four,
five, and copy those over once again to the root directory of our SD card over here on the left.
Then we put the SD card back into the receiver module, power it on
and wait for success to be shown over here on the video display. Tthis could take several minutes so
once again you want to make sure that the battery that you're using to power your receiver module
has got a good charge on it so your receiver module doesn't power down during the middle of
the update. All right, now that we've updated our Shark Byte firmware for both the VTX and the VRX
let's see what we can do with this Canvas firmware update. I almost forgot! Before we check out the
Canvas Mode features, there's a couple other things we need to do. We need to go to page 11 of
our user manual that we just downloaded and follow these steps. Specifically, we need to connect to
Betaflight and go to our Ports Tab and we note that I'm using UART 5 for my Shark Byte system.
I've got the configuration MSP toggled on and set to 115 200 which is as stated in step 2 here.
Then we need to go to the CLI and set the OSD device to MSP
using these commands. We type this in, hit return, type this in, hit return and then type in save and
hit return. So we'll go to our CLI and type in set OSD underline display port . . . set OSD underline
display port device equals MSP. Then we hit return and now the OSD displayport device is set to MSP.
Next, we type in set displayport underline MSP to . . . in my case it's going to be number four
because we want this number to be the serial port that we're using minus one. Since I'm using serial
port five my number is going to be four. So I'm going to type in set displayport underline MSP
underline serial . . . set display port underline MSP serial once again in my case
equal to 4 since the UART I'm using is UART 5 as we saw earlier in our Ports Tab.
So now my MSP serial is set to four. Now before we do anything else we need to type in the word save
and hit return. Then it'll reboot and save our new settings.
This OSD setup under ports we've already accomplished up here UART 5 15 200. Then under
configuration, we need to make sure that we've got OSD toggled on right here. Save and reboot.
Now that we've accomplished those CLI command settings, let's take a look at some of the new
features of our Canvas Mode firmware. Here's some of the OSD elements which can currently
be displayed using Betaflight 4.2.8. Of note, if you're flying Crossfire, you can now select LQ
in the OSD tab rather than RSSI. You no longer need to use an aux channel for it
in your receiver tab. The LQ value is displayed normally up here now with this firmware update.
As indicated in the user manual with the release of Betaflight 4.3.0 coming soon
we should have an even better experience with the Shark Byte firmware. In addition to the
OSD elements, we're able to interact through the OSD to erase our black box flash memory
before a flight if we need more storage capability.
Now we see we've got our full black box flash memory capability. We can change our PID settings.
We can even change our fail-safe mode from GPS to drop if we'd like prior to flight if we know
we're going to be flying under a tree canopy for instance. One more nice feature I want to point
out if you press and hold your Shark Byte scroll wheel to the left you enter its settings menu.
You can then scroll down to antenna diagnostics and actually see the type of reception you're
getting with each of your antenna as indicated up here in the diagram. I think this is some
pretty good stuff Shark Byte's got going on here and, as I mentioned earlier,
it's just going to keep getting better with future updates. Let me know in the comments section below
how you feel about the direction Fat Shark is going with the Shark Byte digital FPV system. I
know I'm pretty excited about it! Thanks for your time. I'll see you next video. Clear skies friend!