Flash Blheli_32 ESCs without a Betaflight flight controller board

I have recently got a great deal for cheap Blheli_32 ESCs and after watching few YouTube reviews I have decided to order them.
There are several brands that are selling the exact same ESCs, you can find them branded as UFOFPV, Furibee, Nidici and HAKRC (there may be some other brands of which I’m not aware). The Furibee have lowest price at the moment

My plan was replace my old FVT LittleBee 30A that are OneShot 125 based and are used on one of my Kissed kwads. This is an old rig and I’m really happy how it flies but I couldn’t bare not trying the Kiss FC in combination with Blheli_32 escs.

Here is a recent video filmed with a Runcam Split on this kwad:

Before installing the escs I have decided to check what firmware are they on aaand for that since this is Kiss FC and there is no pass-trough I needed something based on Betaflight. For that I have an old Naze FC that I use in occasions like this. I have been using it for flashing Blheli_S previously, but in this case it turned out that it is not working for Blheli_32, the developers dropped the pass-trough code in Betaflight 3.2 fo Naze in order to save some space, and the previous versions like 3.1.7 that have the code aren’t connecting because they use older pass-trough protocol so this was a no go.

I wasn’t up to desoldering a F4 board from my working rigs just to use it for flashing so my only other option was to use arduino. I have previously used arduino pro mini for flashing Blheli_S, but it seems that the procedure is a bit different for Blheli_32.

When trying to flash only the Arduino Blheli bootloader I have got an error that the board is not supported yet or a missing file?!@#$ So I went to the second option Arduino 4way-interface and I have chosen the one containing PD3PD2 in the filename. Please note that I’m using

After flashing the firmware the only thing left to do is to connect the esc signal lead to D3 and the ground wire to GND and after connecting the esc if everything is OK the rest of the procedure is similar to the one when using blheli suite with pass-trough from Betaflight.