Apr 23, 2021
Mar 10, 2021
The HappyModel Cine 8 is - as the name suggests - a 85mm cine whoop with which you can carry a Insta360 Go. This copter - similar to the UZ85 - comes as a kit which you have to assemble yourself - and there is no soldering required.
I really like the concept of having to put it together yourself. Everything is plug and play, meaning that all the wires come with plugs and you just plug them in and you are set. The assembly can easily be done in under an hour.
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Feb 27, 2021
DSHOT - Digital shot, is a very popular protocol for flight-controller to ESC communication. In the quadcopter hobby it is nowadays pretty much the standard. The protocol is used to send the target throttle value from the flight-controller to the ESC which in turn interprets it and drives the motor accordingly.
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Feb 22, 2021
Most of you will probably know what BLHELI_S is - the de-facto standard firmware for most brushless-whoop ESC’s and generally most ESC’s we use in the quadcopter hobby nowadays.
Apart from BLHELI_S there is also BLHELI_32 - the 32 bit version of BLHELI which provides bidirectional DSHOT and ESC telemetry out of the box, but is only available on a small subset of ESC’s and up until now only very few of the AIO boards that we commonly use with brushless whoops and toothpicks come with BLHELI_32 ESC’s.
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Jan 27, 2021
In this article we will take a closer look at the T-Lite - Radiomasters first contribution to the niche of gamepad shaped radios.
As the name suggests it is a direct competitor to FrSky’s X-Lite but obviously also competes with other gamepad shaped controllers. I will compare it to the X-Lite and the BetaFPV Lite radio which I have been using for quite some time.
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Jan 17, 2021
I was intrigued when I first saw Nvision Junior Racer75 - I am a sucker for the color purple, so this one instantly won my heart. I have never heard of Nvision before, but the copter seemed super sturdy and I needed to try it out.
This is a whoop sized, 75mm quadcopter - but this one is intended to be flown with 2-3S - and I really recommend 3S for this one, but more on this later. Let’s first address the elephant in the room - this thing weighs in at a whopping 55g without a battery. This is pretty substantial - especially since there are whoops in this size class that weigh less than half of that.
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Jan 3, 2021
Betaflight has a mode in which a flight controller can be used as an input device on your computer. This mode basically makes every radio transmitter a simulator compatible radio - even if you can normally not plug it in via USB to your computer. This feature is called HID Joystick Support.
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Dec 26, 2020
The EMAX Nano Hawk is EMAX’ first attempt at a 65mm indoor brushless whoop - they advertise it as a “Beginner Indoor Nano Racing Drone” - at least that is, what the package states. Let’s see how true this is.
This is one class smaller than their super successful 75mm Tinyhawk series, which was - and still is - one of my favorite entry level whoops.
The Nano Hawk weighs in at just 20g without the battery, which is rather on the light weight side when compared to other “BNF” (Bind and Fly) whoops of its size.
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Nov 29, 2020
In this article I want to show you some neat Betaflight CLI “secrets”. Actually they are not really secrets at all since all of those commands can be found in the manual, but let’s be honest - who reads the manual?
First things first - what does CLI mean? CLI is the abrevation for Command Line Interface. Usually it is an alternative to the GUI - the Graphical User Interface. Usually you can do more via CLI than via GUI - this is especially true for BetaFlight. Sometimes it is simply hard to build a graphical user interface for a setting that takes a lot of parameters or a setting which needs a couple of commands to run in succession.
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Nov 23, 2020
The Happymodel Crux 3 is a super light weight 3” toothpick based on Happymodels CrazybeeX all in one board. And light weight is not just a buzzword in this case - the model weighs in at just under 42g without a battery (just 70g with a 2S 450mAh GNB battery).
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