Unlocking the Flysky FS-i6

My Flysky FS-i6 is a cheap transmitter.  It has been re-branded by other companies but apparently this can work for all of them.  (Yes I said apparently as I haven't tried it on an Eachine or Turnigy variant myself).

Out of the box it is a 6 Channel Transmitter.  This means you can only use 2 auxiliary channels, even though there are 6 switches across the top.  You have to pick which 2 switches you wish to use and assign them as auxiliary channels in the controller's setup.  The ability to "hack" the firmware and unlock all 10 channels certainly appealed to me.  This means you can assign all 6 switches across the top to 6 auxiliary channels.  LET'S DO IT!

Rob ordered a few Arduino Nano boards a few weeks ago and had already donated one to me.  

I soldered the pin headers on and went to to download the files required to do the deed.  I grabbed these from https://github.com/benb0jangles/FlySky-i6-Mod-.  

I watched a few YouTube videos before I started to get an idea for what I needed to do.

This one was helpful.  I didn't take my transmitter apart to wire it to the trainer port from the inside, I just used the trainer port at the back.  I also used Method 1 to put it into Firmware Update mode.  I also soldered the whole row of pin headers to the Arduino, not just the pins i needed to use.

Looked easy enough, a few wires here, a few wires there.  Download this, run that, Boom!  Job done!

Turned out to take a little more fiddling.  I ended up wiring it like this:

Of course it wasn't quite that clean when I did it.  I wasn't going to solder everything together if it wasn't going to work.

I took photos of the front and back of the Arduino.  I wrapped the wires from the resistor around the pin headers, and used it to short out the 2 pins at the bottom.
I just twisted the wires going to the trainer port around the relevant pins across the top row of the Arduino.

I didn't have anything to plug directly into the plug on the trainer port.  I've read that although it is an S-Video plug, S-Video cables don't actually wire the outer Ground to each other.  This means you can't just butcher one, as none of the wires in the cable connect to the Ground ring on the plug itself.

As I was using stranded wire I wrapped those wires around spare resistors I had, and slotted the resistor legs into the Tx and Rx holes.  Another thing I noticed while scouring for screenshots and photos of the wiring was that some variations of the Flysky FS iA6 had the plug around the other way (upside down) from mine.

I connected my Arduino to my Surface (Surface Pro 3 running Windows 10 x64) and it successfully detected as COM3.  

I put the controller in firmware update mode.  I did this by holding the OK button until the menu appeared.  I selected System then scrolled down to Firmware Update.  Then pressed OK to proceed and selected Yes and hit OK again.

I fired up the software and clicked Open Port and it read the current version.

I then clicked the Program button and the progress bar ran to 100%.

My kludge wiring worked!

The controller beeped as it insta-rebooted.  I could then go into the controller settings and assign the auxiliary channels.  In display I could see all 10 Channels working.

It wiped the settings I had in there for my Wizard X220 and QX-70 so now I get to set them up again.  

Now I'll also just need to re-do the configuration of my Wizard with CleanFlight to use ibus instead of PPM.........