iFLight SusseX F4 1S 5A AIO Whoop
• Chris Landa
The iFLight SusseX F4 1S is iFlights newest 1S AIO board-with-VTX-for-FPV-Whoop-iFlight-Alpha-A65-p-1692596.html). It is flight controller, ESC and video transmitter all in one small package weighing in at only 5.4g.
Unfortunately (at least for me) this AIO (All In One) does not come with a receiver on board, so you have to run your own. Personally I like the onboard SPI receivers, but I know that a lot of people don’t so this might actually be a good thing for you.
Big shout-out to iFlight who sent me this flight-controller for the purpose of review.
Flight Controller
The flight controller weighs in at 5.4g, including power lead with PH2.0 connector, video transmitter and antenna.
The Betaflight target for the flight-controller is MatekF411RX and it comes flashed with version 4.1.2 from the factory. The flight-controller is equipped with a F4 processor and everything else you might expect from a 1S flight-controller. On the front of the PCB UART2 (RX and TX) is broken out and allowing you to connect basically any receiver you want to run. RX2 is also available as inverted pad in order for you to run SBUS receivers. On older versions of the board the pad is labeled SBUS, on newer versions it is labeled R2I. 3.3V and 5V are both available.
The motors are intended to be plugged into the flight-controller, but the plugs are on the edge of the flight controller and are thus easily accessible in case you want to de-solder them and direct solder your motors. I usually don’t bother with direct soldering on 65mm whoops - I did once and could not feel and difference in power delivery, and the weight you save is really not worth the effort to me. But I can understand why you would want to do that in case you want to shave off the last milligrams of weight.
Since I use the BetaFPV Lite Radio 2 for all my whoops, I decided to go with a tiny D8 receiver made by EMAX, but which receiver you want to run exactly, is totally up to you.
The flight-controller comes with rubber grommets and all the screws needed for mounting.
A pet peeve of mine are rolled PH2.0 connectors. i simply cannot understand why manufacturers love to use those instead of simply using a solid pin PH2.0 connector. Well, technically I can understand it: using the rolled version means that you can use ready made pigtails with the crimped connectors, instead of soldering and head shrinking a solid pin PH2.0 connector.
ESC’s
The ESC’s are rated to continuously push 5A and 6A burst. They come flashed with BLHELI_S version “O-H-30 BLS 16.8”. Alternatively you can run JESC or BLHELI_M and enable bi-directional DHSOT in order to run RPM filtering.
The deadtime of 30 is rather on the lower side for 1S brushless whoop AIO boards.
I am very surprised that the flight-controller is not shipped by default with BLHELI_M since the iFlight A65 - which is using this same exact board - comes flashed with BLHELI_M out of the box.
Video Transmitter
The video transmitter is soldered to the flight-controller via a pin header. The linear antenna is plugged in via UFL connector and you can basically use any other antenna with UFL connector here. There is a little space between flight-controller and video transmitter to allow for the air to flow and cool down the video-transmitter a bit.
Your FPV camera is directly soldered/plugged to the video transmitter and routes the video signal through the OSD chip of the flight controller, so you only need to solder 3 wires to get the camera running.
There seem to be two different version of the video transmitter. The first board (Version 1.0) that I got only had pads to solder your FPV cam to. A newer board (Version 1.1) came with a plug on the video transmitter to simply plug in your camera. Personally I would have preferred for them to keep the pads so you can direct solder your FPV cam(or make it possible to break off the connector and leave half through hole pads), but i guess having a plug makes it easier to swap your camera should you break it.
Channels and output power can be adjusted via TBS Smart Audio protocol. Output power is switchable between 25 and 50mW.
Version 1.1 of this board did not have the video transmitter set up - I am not sure if this is because of me having a review sample or if this will generally be the case.
Usually I am not a big fan of stacks where the components plug into each other, but since the video-transmitter is not mounted to anything else, there is no real risk of the pads ripping out. Also they are all through hole and seem pretty solid. Even after lots of crashing, there are absolutely no issues.
I prefer this style of video transmitter over the CrazybeeX solution where everything is on one board. The video quality is definitely much better with the iFlight board than with the CrazybeeX.
Setup
To setup the video transmitter, go to the “Ports” Tab in Betaflight and on UART1 enable “VTX (TBS SmartAudio)” in the “Peripherals” section.
Then in the “Videotransmitter” tab, load the proper VTX-Table configuration that you can obtain from the iFlight website.
You can then adjust your settings from the “Videotransmitter” tab. Keep in mind that you will need to powercycle the flight controller after initially flashing the configuration in order for changes to take effect from the “Videotransmitter” tab.
Conclusion
I really like this flight controller, especially since it comes with its own video transmitter - one thing less that you have to take care of. Also I quite like the iFlight products - so far everything I have from them worked exactly as advertised.
With a price tag of around 43$ on banggood-with-VTX-for-FPV-Whoop-iFlight-Alpha-A65-p-1692596.html) or even cheaper - 37$ in the iFlight webshop it is absolutely fair for what you get.
What I would really love to see is a version with integrated FrSky SPI receiver, then this would be my go-to flight controller for 1S builds.
I would also like to see a solid pin PH2.0 connector instead of the rolled pin connector that is included. Also the configuration could be better straight out of the box - I would at least expect the video transmitter to be setup properly. But since this is easy enough to do on your own and I am not sure if it is not just an issue with my review sample, I have a hard time to really criticize that.
Chris is a Vienna based software developer. In his spare time he enjoys reviewing tech gear, ripping quads of all sizes and making stuff.
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