How to setup a turnigy 9x remote to control a rc moa crawler dig

I’ve been running my axial xr10 dahu crawler for some time with a modified traxxas tqi remote and a novak M2 esc using a 3 position switch to control the dig. While functional I wanted to give a shoot to the proportional mode of the M2. I then got a hacked turnigy 9x.

It turned out the M2 proportional mode never worked as I wanted it , even with help of novak and replacement parts from them. I also got a futaba 4pl since they tough my turnigy was the source of the problem. I didn’t really like using the 4pl to control my crawler anyway so got rid of it and bough a pair of micro sidewinder from castle creation.

The remote is the turnigy 9x v2 with hacked firmware.

I started by making some physical modification on the turnigy 9x. I blocked the left stick to only go up and down (used a small washerunder one of the gold screw to prevent the bar from moving), I installed the right stick spring on the left stick so it return to middle by itself. Then I installed the friction bar on the right stick (the one from left channel and tighten it quite a lot) so it’s much harder to move it now and kept the spring for left and right travel on that right stick.

So stick configuration is now :

left stick

up-down throttle auto centering

Left-right blocked

right stick

up-down dig friction

left-right direction auto centering

Receiver setup

Then I used some old servo to figure out how to configure the remote to activate the dig properly. This can be done with motors but I find it much easier with the servos.

I’m using a hobbyking 3 channels receiver to save weight in my crawler. 3 channels is enough to control the direction and each esc.

Configurations on the 9x

Now i’m using this configuration

ail = direction

thr= first esc

ele= second esc

If you decide for a different stick configuration you will have to change the parameter accordingly.

The basic reasoning behind the configuration for a dig is that you will have to multiply the output of the dig stick to the one from the throttle and send this to the esc. In order to multiply, the dig stick must output something different than the normal -100 0 100 output. What you need is a 100 100 0 and a 0 100 100 curves.

This can be done in the menu page 7, the result is shown here

In order to do that you will have to create cv1 and cv2 and shown bellow

curve 1

 curve 2

Now that we have usable value for dig to multiply the throttle with, we go back to page and create the output to each receiver channels

My receiver configuration is :

ch1 = direction or ail

ch2 = first esc

ch3 = second esc

I won’t go in the detail on how to edit and modify value in the menu but it quite easy once you learn how to use the d-pad and the menu and exit button.

The result will be something like this

First thing to know is that the output for ch2 and ch3 are identical except for the curves used in the multiplication, one use curve c1 and the other curve c2.

So start with ch2 and configure the first line as the throttle stick with these configurations

As you can see the only thing I did was change the source to the stick I’m using as throttle.

Now we need to create the line 2, or the one used for the multiplication with the dig stick (in my case it’s ELE).

To do that you need to add a second line for ch2 and then edit it so the source is now your dig stick, the multpx is changed to multiply and the curves is set to either c1 or c2 that you created before. Here is how it should look.

You need to do the same configuration for ch3.

Once done you should end up with this configuration that I previously shown

It’s now time to test the configuration with either you servo test setup or your esc and do the c1 and c2 adjustment so the dig stick position activate the proper position.

As needed you can also adjust the end limit and the trimmer in the page 6.

I started with these value and fine tuned as needed. Keep in mind that even if the value of the limit can go up to 125%, going over 118 119 can cause cross channels interferences. If you get glitches running the crawler try to back theses value down a little.

There is also a way to use a 3 position switch to override the dig stick if this have any use for you. For that you will have to do a new mix that will replace the ELE value with the switch you select. I recommend not playing with that for now but once you get everything working you can try some variation of this configuration.

IMPORTANT : don’t forget to do a proper esc calibration once you connect the receiver to the esc.