PID Tuning For Quadcopters | The Ultimate Guide

At first, I thought building a multirotor was going to be hard.

Then I tried tuning.

I feel tuning is not so easy to grasp because it’s both objective and subjective at the same time.

It’s objective because it’s math! But at the same time, it’s subjective because everyone’s idea of a good tune is significantly different.

It was one of the toughest things for me to learn, and honestly, I still don’t have a completely firm grasp on it. I do have a general idea of it, though, enough to make tweaks to get my craft to fly a little better. I am yet to find the elusive “perfect tune”, though.

Luckily, there are many excellent PID tuning resources put out there by some very talented pilots. Studying them, going through them over and over again, and studying them a bit more has given me a bit of an idea how to go about PID tuning.

Note: Betaflight 3.0 onwards is a little different tuning process. Check out this post for more information.

How your copter behaves when you change values

This is one of the best videos I have ever seen on PID tuning. Alex Greve, also known as IBCrazy, explains in plain english what PIDs are and the effect a too high setting will have on your machine. He also explains the range of values you can set your PIDs at. To this date, this is one of the best technical videos I have ever seen on PID tuning.

In this video, Alex shows you flight footage with P, I, and D values set at extremes and then proper values. This video is very good at showing you how you would see the copter’s behavior in FPV. The only drawback is that Alex uses the CC3D flight controller on this multirotor and the value ranges are way different from what you’d be used to from Cleanflight, so while you’ll get a good idea of what the copter does, it may be a little hard to see how much of an adjustment you can make to get into line.

Even though this video is a little dated, Korey does a great job in less than 3 minutes of explaining the basic behaviors of a quadcopter when you change the different settings on it.

Step by step guides

These guides are helpful for tuning in both LOS and FPV.

Boris B’s PID tuning guide from the Betaflight Wiki

Boris does a great job of explaining what values you really need to worry about and prioritize, and gives you a brief technical explanation as well as a step-by-step method of getting your PIDs where you want them.

John Case’s PID tuning guide from OpenTX university

This guide is very in-depth – it takes you all the way from PID theory to how each factor effects your copter to a step-by-step PID tuning guide.

Oscar Liang’s PID tuning guide

Oscar Liang has great multirotor content on his blog, and his PID tuning post is right up there. Oscar’s explanation is fairly simple and straightforward, and he has also made distinctions for values for acrobatic and smooth/gentle flight.

The Propwashed In-flight adjustments guide

This is a very detailed guide that specifically looks at tuning Cleanflight/Betaflight using a Taranis X9D transmitter. The beauty of this method is that you can increase each value while your copter is in the air and see each minute difference as the values change. To get an initial tune for a very nicely flying copter, this guide is spot-on.

iFlyQuad’s PID tuning guide explains P, I, and D in pretty simple terms, and there is also a step-by-step tuning guide. The tuning guide is pretty concise, and the additional sections on TPA and yaw PIDs add great value as not much information about them is available elsewhere.

PID tuning in FPV for Cleanflight and Betaflight

This 3-part video series by Joshua Bardwell is one of the best and most practical guides to PID tuning that I have seen. In fact, after just watching part one and trying out what I learned, I was able to get my Shrieker flying pretty decently.

This is one of the best single video tuning processes I’ve seen. Kevin AKA Stingersswarm does an excellent job explaining a repeatable process you can use on both KISS and BetaFlight.

This is not to say the other guides listed here are not good – if I didn’t have the background I gained from the posts and videos above, this video would have been difficult to understand.

Tuning using Blackbox

An advanced part of tuning is using the Blackbox feature in Cleanflight/Betaflight to tune your copter. If you have a flash memory chip(either separate or built into your flight controller), you can log the flight data to a file and open it up in Cleanflight’s Blackbox Explorer. Of course, if you don’t know what you are looking at, it’ll just seem like a bunch of squiggly lines. Joshua Bardwell has done hundreds of Blackbox analyses on his channel – going through some of them will give you a really good idea of what to look for.

Conclusion

Learning how to tune your PIDs is an ongoing process. Sure, you can take shortcuts with Betaflight and get pretty decent flying from just the stock settings, but tuning will really get your copter flying the way you want it. Once you fly a tuned quadcopter, you will never want to go back to a stock one!

These are some of the resources which I have found most useful during my research. I am sure there are many more – if you know of any, please do share them in the comments and I’ll be happy to add them to the list.