Upgrading Ethos on my X20

[ernie.buenafe]

I recently got a new X20 transmitter with the new Ethos OS programming environment. From both a hardware and software perspective, this is the TX to have. I know this is high praise, but that's seeming to be the case.

The version of Ethos that came installed on my X20 was 1.0.1. I believe that's the earliest instantiation of the OS. Things have changed (improved?) since then. I was eager to upgrade to the latest release. Currently, that is 1.0.11.

It's evident to me that Ethos and OpenTX share a common codebase. The similarities between the two OSes are just too compelling. To my mind, that's great news. That being the case, I had hoped I would be able to use OpenTX Companion to do the Ethos upgrade. Alas, that was not to be. Companion does not recognize X20 nor X20S as one of its transmitters. The upgrade would have to be done manually.

---The Upgrade Process--

Step 1:

The upgrade begins by placing the X20 in bootloader mode. That's done by holding the 'enter' button while clicking the power button. The screen will display the message 'Bootloader.' Next, using the USB cable that came with the X20, I plugged the TX into my computer. The screen display changed to 'USB plugged.' Two USB drives showed up. On my computer, these were USB E: and F:. USB E: is of size 8MB. That's the internal flash drive in the TX. USB F: is the SD card. The SD card that came with my X20 was only 4GB. I had replaced it with a 32GB SD card, formatted as FAT32. Previously, I had copied the contents the 4GB card to the new 32GB card.

Step 2:

Three zip files need to be downloaded from the Ethos GitHub website. These are for the flash drive, SD card, and firmware. I downloaded the latest release 1.0.11. With the three files downloaded and the TX plugged into my computer, the upgrade process could begin in earnest. This simply involved coping the downloaded files to their respective USB drives on the TX. Since the downloaded files are in zip format, I extracted them. Windows 10 makes that easy, just click on the filename and the extracted directory appears. First, I copied the flash drive contents, a directory labeled 'bitmaps', to the root directory of USB E:. Next, I copied the contents of the SD card to USB F:. These were directories labeled 'audio' and 'bitmaps.' These are large and took a while. The final file transfer was the actual firmware binary called 'firmware.bin.' This was copied into the root directory of the X20's SD card, i.e., USB F:.

Step 3:

With the three file transfer complete, all that was needed was to unplug TX from the computer. As soon as the cable was unplugged, the screen on TX changed to "Writing firmware on flash..." This took a minute or two. With flashing complete, I turned off the TX and turned it back on. And voila, my X20 was now upgraded to 1.0.11.

My next task will be programming a glider model using Ethos. We'll see how that goes, but that'll be a future post.