MEPS brushless whoop motors - an introduction
• Chris
MEPS, a relatively new player in the FPV market (although, according to themselves they have been in the business for a couple of years), and it already started out with quite a bit of drama - I will get into it a little bit later.
MEPS were nice enough to send me a set of their 0802 and 1103 motors to have a look at, so a big shout out to them.
As with everyone who sends me stuff, I confirmed that I will do a review but I will not skew my review in any way. The only thing that the companies have a say in, is if they want to correct factual errors. I told this to MEPS and they were having no issues with that whatsoever.
MEPS is offering a wide variety of Motors and some electronics. When they asked me if I was interested in reviewing some of their products, I asked them to send me whatever they had that was whoop related. The items I received were:
About MEPS
I am always curious about new FPV companies and asked if MEPS were prepared to answer some of my questions, and they were - so here we go:
Q: Do you want your brand to be references as MEPS or mepsking?
A: Definetly MEPS.
Q: How long does the company exist for and does it belong to another company?
A: [REDACTED - MEPS asked me to remove the answer to this question]
Q: How many people work for MEPS?
A: According to my MEPS contact the current team consists of around 60 people, which makes sense considering all the employees of Nanchang. But sounds a bit unrealistic for MEPS alone.
Q: Is development and production in house or is an OEM being used?
A: All products are in house developments and are also produced in house, as the attached images show which MEPS was kind enough to share:
Q: Will there be AM32 hardware, and are there any plans to produce an AIO?
A: Meps might - in fact - produce “mainstream ESC hardware” at some point, further there will also be some AIO FC’s in the future.
Controversy
Unfortunately MEPS got into some controversies from the get go. This is for a couple of reasons:
- Contract: MEPS sent a very restrictive contract to some creators/reviewers. I think I got the same thing everyone else got. They asked me to acknowledge it, but did not make me sign anything. I told them that I am OK with almost all what they were asking for apart form them green-lighting my article. I told them, I would send it to them first to check it, but would not allow them to change anything apart from factual mistakes, they agreed to that.
- AI content on their website: They have/had some content on their website that has been clearly AI generated. This has since been edited and improved upon.
- Plagiarized content: Some of their articles on the website seemed as if they were copy/pasted from other articles. I tried to reach out to some potential authors but never heard back. I see that they at least use images with other peoples brands in it, so I am not 100% sure what the case is here. As you can see from the short interview I conducted above, they claim that this is all original content.
I found out about the controversy after they asked me to have a look at their motors. If I’d have known beforehand, I would probably have rejected the review offer as to not come over biased. But since they sent me the motors and I agreed to a review, I of course also want to keep my part of the agreement.
The Motors
The shafts of the 0802 and 1103 motors are both made from stainless steel, they are planning to release different KV options in the future for all motors they are offering and are awaiting customer feedback as to what the market wants to see.
The 0802 motor comes with a 1mm shaft, 6.6mm and the whoop typical 3 hole mounting pattern. The 1103 motor has a 1.5mm shaft and comes with a 9mm, 4 hole mounting pattern.
Accessories
Every motor comes with a set of mounting screws, a set of washers and a c-clip. I think this is really a nice touch. I can’t count how often a c-clip has popped off or got lost when cleaning the motors, so having spares of those is really thoughtful and something I personally appreciate a lot.
Pricing
Considering that you are buying directly from the manufacturer I feel that the prices are on the high side. I can buy a set of BetaFPV 0802 motors on Amazon, have them the next day and pay $45. So ordering them from China for $10 a pop, having to wait couple of weeks or shill out extra money to get them shipped quickly, then having to handle customs just does not seem worth it to me. Considering that customs would be 20% additionally one 0802 motor would end up to be $12 for me, considering the free shipping option.
Conclusion
The motors are not bad, the quality seems quite solid - have been putting dozens of packs through my 1S whoop with the 0802 motors and have had zero issues so far. The biggest downside for me is simply the price. They are not so much more premium than BetaFPV motors and those I can quickly get off of Amazon, so it’s a bit of a hard sell to me - if MEPS would also stock them on Amazon, I would consider them a real alternative, since they are selling direct to customer that’s something that might happen in the future maybe.
I personally don’t like the aesthetics that much, I would have preferred neon colors instead of the gold, as they have with some of their bigger motors.
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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