In order to set your multirotor drone soaring into the skies, the pilot has to first connect it to the computer to adjust settings in the flight controller’s configurator. The configurator could be Betaflight, Cleanflight, Raceflight or Kiss. There could occur Betaflight Failed Error.
Quite often, once you hook up the board say with Betaflight, the following error prompt is displayed by the configurator:
“Failed to open serial port”
In reality, the flight controller communicates with the computer via the USB port but it is not the direct USB interface. As a matter of fact, the software must be made to believe that it is a threadbare serial COM port. That is the way how the chips on the flight controller can be read and written into.
This Betaflight issue can be resolved with ease. You simply have to get the Virtual COM port drivers from SiLabs downloaded which are available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
It takes no more than a couple of minutes to get the drivers installed and if asked by the computer, simply restart the computer. Get the flight controller unplugged from the USB.
Shut down the browser and the configurator, open them up again, get the flight controller connected and click Connect. Everything should work fine now.
In order to ensure that the flight controller is working fine, take a glimpse at the drop-down menu in top right of the software’s screen and determine the COM port to which the configurator is trying to get connected to.
As seen in the image below, in our case, it was the Bluetooth incoming port.
If you click on the drop down menu, you can see other ports and the one you need to select is the “USBModem1421”. It is compatible with both “tty” and “cu”. We are not really sure about the actual difference between the two. So, if any of you out there has some idea about it, be generous and do not hesitate to share with us in the comments section below.
If it Betaflight still fails to connect
- Try out another cable: It has been observed that an old USB cable may cause some connectivity issues with the board and the configurator. It may work sometimes and on other occasions, it may even refuse to respond. The issue can be resolved by using a totally new or different cable.
- Try out another USB port: You might as well try out a new USB port since on some occasions, we can have the USB port misbehaving.
- Get your computer restarted: You can get your system restarted to see if it fixes the connectivity issue.