Flash your X4R, XSR or X8R receivers using your Frsky Taranis

I stumbled on a nifty feature where you can use your Taranis to flash your receiver firmware, all you need is the supplied smart port cable, no programmers, or software.

One of the reasons you might want to do this is to update newer firmware to fix bugs with one of your receivers, or add functonallity, like updating your X4R-SB to support PPM as well as SBUS channel outputs.

Read on to find out how to do it

Wiring it up

All you need to do is wire some of the pins from your Taranis module bay to your receiver, the bottom most pin is the smartport connection, the second from the bottom is ground (negative), and the third from the bottom is power. Wire them to the corresponding pins on your receiver.

The receiver won’t power up yet, that will happen further down.

Copy the firmware to the Taranis SD card

You can either use an SD card reader or copy the firmware (files ending in .frk) directly to the Taranis using a USB cable (for which the Taranis needs to be in bootloader mode). Either way you need to copy the firmware into the “Firmwares” folder on the card using an SD card reader.

If you don’t know how to get your Taranis into bootloader mode, the steps are outlined here

You can download the latest firmware for your Frsky equipment from the Frsky downloads area

Flash it

Start up your Taranis, press and hold the “Menu” button and you will go into the “Radio Setup” screen. Press “Page” once which will take you to the SD card screen