In August 2016, Google announced its intent to discontinue support for Chrome Apps on all platforms other than Chrome OS. The plan was to start discontinuing apps starting in mid-2017 with most apps being completely unusable in early 2018. The driving factor behind this decision was that Chrome apps were “not being used” – Google cited that less than 1% of users have ever installed a Chrome app.

This sucks for the miniquad world – we may very well be the 1% of users Google was talking about. Most of us use at least 3 Chrome apps regularly: Betaflight Configurator, BLHeli Configurator and Blackbox Explorer.

Cross-platform configuration tool for BLHeli-based electronic speed controllers You can now flash both SiLabs and Atmel BLHeli ESCs! Flight Controller passthrough is the only interface supported at. Grab BlHeli Configurator. Note that from inside the BlHeli Configurator, you can load load the DSHOT hex files, so there is no need to download the HEX files from github. However, if you like to have all the use the hex files from the github repo. I noticed that blheli32 required windows-only software after I bought my ESCs but it runs absolutely fine with wine on linux (I saw some guides for mac os as well). Still closed source though:P level 1.

This week it looks like the hammer has dropped. All three apps can no longer be found on the Chrome Store using the built-in search functionality, and we suspect permalinks to them will be going offline shortly. Fortunately, the amazing developers in our community have not been asleep at the wheel – a workaround is available.

Betaflight Configurator and Blackbox Explorer are now available as standalone applications. They can be downloaded from the following locations:

Betaflight Configurator

Betaflight configurator can be run as a standalone application on Windows, Mac and Linux. It can be downloaded from the releases page on Github:
https://github.com/betaflight/betaflight-configurator/releases

Once downloaded, unzip the application somewhere on your computer. There is currently no option to install Betaflight Configurator as a conventional application. You must double click the executable from the unzipped folder to start the app.

Blheli 32 Configurator Download

Betaflight Blackbox Explorer

Betaflight Blackbox Explorer can be installed as a standalone application installer for Windows and Mac. It can be found under the dist/ directory on Github:

Download the set-up executable for your OS and install as normal. The application can then be started from your OS’ launcher.

BLHeli Configurator

As of 12/11/2017, BLHeli Configurator is not offering a standalone app. If this is not rectified by Google’s closure date for the app store, Windows users can go back to using BLHeliSuite. If an app becomes available, we will post it on this page.

Blheli Configurator Github