VAR Mixers - ETHOS's Unsung Innovation

One of the challenges many have had with ETHOS is there's no simple way to get a series of fixed values in a Free mix that are selected by a switch. This was fairly easy to do on OpenTX, although never as easy as it should have been, leaving many (including me) mystified as to how to do it right.

As it happens, the answer was there all the time. It's the VAR mix.

What the VAR mix does is VERY simple.

You have a default value, followed by a set of alternate values triggered by a condition (switch, logical switch or flight mode) that are in priority.

You have an output channel.

These values are in a priority cascade, so the top value whose condition is Active will be output on the channel. The channel can be either a virtual channel (not assigned to any function in the aircraft) or a functional channel (assigned to a function in the aircraft.

Note that Mixer weights in ETHOS can come from a channel value, so you can use a VAR channel as this. This is most useful for a Free Mix which can have multiple curves but only one set of weights. 

To make this even more useful, any Weight has two extra options - 'Use a Source' which allows any valid input source to be used, and if selected, you get 'Convert to Value' which lets you save the source after adjusting. This allows a VAR mixer to become an input selector and also to be used to save values after tuning with ease. 

Right now there is one thing still missing, which is the ability to easily alter the current active value in a persistent fashion.