How to use Betaflight Presets

One of the most useful new features in Betaflight 4.3 is presets. It’s been a few months since Betaflight 4.3 official release came out, if you are not already using Presets then you should!

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What are Betaflight Presets?

Betaflight Presets are basically little snippets of command lines that you can download and apply to your flight controller. Presets in Betaflight Configurators are uploaded by the developers and community. The ones that are labelled Official are generally safe to use, but when you see experimental you should be more cautious when applying and understand the risk involved.

In a preset you can see what it’s changing exactly by checking its CLI lines (Show CLI).

Presets for Backup and Restore

One of the nicest bonus of presets is the ability to back up and restore your Betaflight configurations. This is useful when you have a new drone, you can “Save Backup” its settings before making any changes, if anything goes wrong you can simply “Load Backup” and it will bring your flight controller back to its original state.

In the Presets tab in Betaflight Configurator, you can find the “Save Backup” and “Load Backup” buttons on top of the screen.

The “Save Backup” button is the same as entering the “diff all” command in CLI, but it also opens a dialog and ask you where to save it as a text file. The “Load Backup” button will take that saved text file and enter the command lines in CLI for you automatically and save it.

Loading RC_Link Configurations

Different RC link requires specific RC smoothing and feedforward configurations due to the different packet rate and packet interval in order to avoid problems with Feedforward. This is highly recommended if you have a RC link with packet rate higher than 150Hz.

To save you trouble googling and asking people what the settings are every time you need to setup a new drone, you can simply search it in the Presets and apply it to your drone.

In Categories, select RC_Link and you will get all the RC link settings. You can also search in Keywords by the packet rate.

By loading the suitable RC_Link preset, Betaflight will apply all the necessary config for you automatically. Don’t forget there are a few more options to pick before loading the preset, especially flying style, for most people it would be Freestyle.

If you are using Crossfire, it’s best to lock the packet rate to either 50Hz (longer range) or 150Hz (lower latency). You can do this in the TBS Agent Lite LUA script.

VTX Tables

If you use an analog VTX then you need to enter a VTXtable specific to your VTX in order to get SmartAuio/Tramp protocol working. Simply select VTX in the Categories, or search in Keywords.

Rates from Other Pilots

You can now get access to other pilots rates easily in the Presets tab. Under Categories, select RATES.

OSD Configurations

Do you have a messy OSD layout and not sure how to improve it? Try the OSD element configurations by other pilots!

How to Restore Default Settings

You can revert your settings back to default. The even better thing about Presets is that you can restore only certain settings, perhaps you just want to restore PID and filters or RC_Link and nothing else, now you don’t have to wipe out everything.

To restore certain default settings, just type in Keywords “defaults”, and select a category.

Do I need to change to default before trying a different preset?

No, when you load a preset, it will automatic set the relevant settings back to default values before applying the new preset. So just apply a new preset whenever you want.