Radio Side:
I got the Smartieparts on a nice holiday sale. I wish they were a bit cheaper for this project but they are well made, come with *everything* you need and it makes the whole project far less daunting for the average person. I also had a quick interaction with Steven and he was awesome. I don't need to add anything to his installation instructions, I followed them exactly. I did the 1/8 inch hole in the TX and popped the pins out of the holder.
I didn't have to get the backlight, but it just made sense to do it while the TX was apart. It makes a huge difference in the readability of this TX. I just cut off the plug, soldered and electrical taped the backlight leads to the included Smartieparts plug.
It ends up quite a tight fit in the TX. I had to fiddle around for a bit to get it all in there.
Turns out the TX assembly was much easier than the work once the case was closed. I'm currently still using ER9X but I heard from a poll on the Iris Facebook group that 3DRobotics has changed over to opentx for Iris+. I used Eepe to load my firmware. You'll also need Avrdude which is called to do the actual flashing. I ran into two problems I hope I can help people around here. First I had a bad USB cable. I didn't think this was a thing that happened and I pulled the whole thing apart an extra time because of this. If your computer doesn't recognize your device try swapping cables. In Linux dmesg I saw nothing, on Mac dmesg I got
Jun 21 21:04:49 MDD kernel[0]: USBF: 3305.491 [0x2a3e300] The IOUSBFamily is having trouble enumerating a USB device that has been plugged in. It will keep retrying. (Port 4 of hub @ location: 0x18200000)Once that was resolved I first saved off my old Iris Firmware and EEPROM settings. Unfortunately my configuration wasn't entirely factory because I had enabled some other configuration which I have yet to document. My first load reported a checksum failure while reading back the data. The remote failed to boot at this point. I then tried flashing back to the original and got a very similar error (location 0x0100 fails to verify). At this point I had to remain calm and not panic. After a bit of research I found that Avrdude has a bug in version 6.0.x which causes it to write the first block twice or something like that. Obviously this won't work. 6.0.x is the current Ubuntu 14.04 and Homebrew version so you will likely have to get it from somewhere else. I sadly ignored my better judgement and used the .deb from this forum.
This also meant that I got to reconfigure my Model. I had dumped the EEPROM so I think I could have migrated them but I figured learning a bit about how to set things up was not bad. The Mixer ro get the multi-position switch setup was especially fun. I found the manual only got me so far. I found this tutorial also helpful. The specific thing I missed was that I should be using replace rather than add for the mutli-switch madness.
I don't yet have the RX side of the telemetry setup so I can't see much yet. I'm 99.9% sure the signal strength meters come back trough the telemetry so here it is. Oh, and the backlight looks nice too.
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