Tinyhawk 2 Race Review
• Chris
The Tinyhawk 2 Race is basically the outdoor version of the Tinyhawk 2. They share a fair amount of components. The Tinyhawk Race is a 2S, 2” toothpick style quadcopter which you should definitely fly outside.
You can also fly it on 1S, but honestly - once you tried the Race on 2S there is no going back.
The Tinyhawk 2 was kindly sent to be by banggood for the purpose of review.
- Overview
- Motors and props
- Flight-controller
- Cam and video transmitter
- Frame and Canopy
- Batteries
- JESC
- Pros
- Cons
- Conclusion
Overview
Flight controller, VTX and camera are basically the same that you get with the Tinyhawk 2. So they share quite a few spare parts, which is really nice.
The nice carrying case contains the following parts:
- The Tinyhawk 2 Race
- Two, 1S 450mAh batteries
- A six port 1S battery charger - you can set each port to normal (4.2V) or high volt (4.35V)
- A set of props (unfortunately no spares)
- Spare screws
- A small screwdriver
- Some stickers
Motors and Props
The motors are 1103, 7500KV. They have a three hole mounting pattern, similar to the early versions of the Amax 1103 motors. Unfortunately this fairly limits your choice of motors should you, at some point, want to swap them for something different.
The props are 2”, 3 blade Avan Blur props, but you can also run the Avan Micro 2”, 4 blade props if you prefer. I really like the 2”, 4 blade Avans, they seem to handle a bit smoother, less aggressive than the Blur. I also have less prop-wash with those. The Blur are definitely more aggressive and have a higher top end speed.
I would highly recommend to get some spare props since only one set is included.
The friction fit of the props is pretty decent. I would still recommend to screw them down since you can lose them during a crash or while turtling. This is what happend to me and it was especially painful since I did not have any spares of the Blur props.
Flight controller
The flight controller ist a custom made F4 AIO flight controller with 5A ESC’s and a FrSky D8 SPI receiver on board. The motors are directly soldered to the flight controller, but there are still plugs available (which are not easily accessible, so it would have been nice to just not populate them, to keep the weight down even further).
Cam and VTX
The cam is a Runcam Nano 2: a 700TVL CMOS cam with a 1/3” sensor. The cam is mounted to the canopy in its own protective shell and the angle can be adjusted quite flexibly. The VTX is switchable between 25mW, 100mW and 200mW. In it’s default state it comes locked to 25mW and a couple of frequencies can not be used. In order to unlock it, you need to press the button on the VTX while powering the quadcopter on. The VTX can be either controller via the button or (preferably) via SmartAudio.
The Runcam Nano 2 is not my favorite cam, I am thinking about swapping it with a Foxeer Razer. But any Nano sized cam with the screw holes on the side will fit.
Frame and canopy
The carbon frame is 3mm thick and does not flex at all. The whole construction seems pretty sturdy and during my tests I was not able to break either the frame nor the canopy, which is quite impressive.
The copter weighs in at 44.6g without batteries and at 70g inclusive the 1S batteries. The batteries are mounted with a small hook and loop strap, thus allow you to be rather flexible with your choice of batteries.
Batteries
The quadcopter is intended to be used on 2S and comes with two 1S, 450mAh HV batteries to be connected to a battery plug that has two PH2.0 connectors on it. Although these being solid pin connectors, I would highly recommend swapping this to an XT30 plug and simply get some GNB 2S 450mAh batteries.
A jumper is included to bridge one of the battery plugs in order to fly it on 1S, but I do not really see the point of doing that, as I mentioned in the introduction: Once you flew it on 2S, you will probably never want to fly it on 1S anyway.
I flew the first couple of packs with the 1S batteries, but then quickly switched to the XT30 plug. The improvement is honestly not too big, but you can definitely feel it.
The batteries are mounted “toilet-tank style” meaning their weight is distributed on the roll axis. I am not a particular fan of that, and usually prefer mine to be mounted in the pitch axis. But to be honest, I could not really feel the different way of battery mounting - usually I notice that with a more sensitive roll axis.
With the GNB 2S, 450mAh batteries I get a flight time of a whopping 5:30 - and that is me flying it pretty aggressively. You can easily get out more by using HV. If you prefer cruising, I am sure you can easily get a flight time of 7 minutes.
I also tried my GNB 2S, 300mAh batteries, but they lack a bit of punch - but this could be due to the fact that they are already quite old. Unfortunately I did not have any 520mAh 2S batteries on hand, but they might also be a good choice.
JESC
Since the flight-controller is the same that is used with the Tinyhawk 2, you can also run JESC on the Tinyhawk 2 Race. Unfortunately the benefit of running 48kHz is not too high on the Race, but the RPM filters help a lot.
The default BLHELI_S version is:
BLHELIS-S-H-90 (16.7)
There is quite some prop-wash in its default configuration, the RPM filters really work wonders here.
Here is a video of me flighing the Tinyhawk Race 2 on 1S, 2S and 2S with RPM filters so that you can get a feeling of its performance.
Pros
The Tinyhawk Race 2 is a rocket on 2S - I could not believe how well it performed out of the box. It is also very quiet, so you can easily fly it in a park without anyone complaining about the noise or probably even noticing it.
The frame - generally the whole exterior is pretty sturdy. I had a couple of crashes against concrete and steel. Apart from some scratches on the carbon and canopy, everything is still looking mint.
Who ever put this together obviously knew what they were doing.
Check out my insta post here - the only thing that happened after this crash is, that one of the 1S batteries got ejected:
Cons
I personally think, that the Tinyhawk Race would benefit from larger props - some 65mm props maybe. Unfortunately the tolerances are so tight that you will not be able to run those kind of props without making modifications to the canopy.
I don’t quite understand the double PH2.0 connector. Sure, you could fly it on 1S, but let’s be honest, who is going to do that? An XT30 connector would have made way more sense.
What I also did not like is that you have to remove the props in order for the Tinyhawk race to properly fit into its case. There would have been enough space in the foam to make the cutout for the props to - but you can easily make that yourself.
Conclusion
The Tinyhawk 2 Race is super quiet and simply rips. If you have a slightly bigger outdoor space - lets say a backyard - and you want to fly something more powerful than a whoop, the Tinyhawk 2 Race is a great choice.
Also, as the name might suggest you will have a lot of fun racing this thing - I am sure you can easily impress impress 3” pilots with this rocket.
By now I’ve put at least a hundred packs through this copter, and it is so much fun. Due to its rather low weight you can crash it without having the fear that it breaks - worst thing that happened to me was that I ripped off the RX antenna during a crash.
This quadcopter is not something I would recommend to an absolute beginner - if you are just starting out, I would rather go with the “classic” Tinyhawk 2.
You can get it for around $115 on banggood and with this price-tag you can’t really go wrong: Definitely a reliable, sturdy and well tuned micro quadcopter - ready to rip straight out of the box.
Do not forget to also get some spare props, an XT30 connector and some proper 2s batteries.
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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