T-Motor Falcon/F 15

This just came out this week, and since I'm a huge T-Motor fan I (along with apparently a lot) of other people just received GetFPV's e-mail blast, hit the link, and bought it before we could even read the description. And of course, if you did read the description - you were too late! Sold out. :)

So, the details were very thin - basically a few photos and not a lot in terms of description. Right off the bat you just know you're getting a 2s-3s 2" CF build, T-Motor F15/6000kV brushless motors, some type of camera/VTX, and it's supposed to.... Fly?

So let's clear all that up.

The build: Hardware

Everything in the hardware is very straightforwards. You can check the photos below; and better specs are on the box than the websites that I saw at the time.

• Diagonal length: 95mm
• 1mm approx CF frame lower
• Clear ABS 3d-printed housing upper
• Clear ABS prop guards
• T-Motor F15 6000kV brushless motors
• Gemfan 2040 3-blade, 2-bolt props
• Unknown Camera/VTX at approximately 100-105mm, 4:3 aspect, 25mW constant vertical linear dipole output, and smartaudio control for VTX band/channels... Race band is not supported; linear dipole antenna soldered onto the VTX points downwards in rear of the dome. Camera/VTX is in a sandwich combo which I did not have time to remove; video is passed through the FC/OSD before transmission.
• 20mm stack: 4in1 ESC, FC/OSD combo, LED/Buzzer Combo
• Flight Controller: Omnibus F3 with Barometer (produced by TransTEC Singapore). ONLY SBUS IS SUPPORTED
• The FC is connected to your receiver with a convenient 3-lead harness (pictured); however, there's no S-Port or similar support as you can see on the FC.
• 15A 4in1 ESC with BLHELI_S, supports at least DSHOT600
• TPU Battery Mat on the underside to help keep your battery in place, with some soft-on-one-side, sticky-on-the-other velcro strap as a battery strap.
• Weight, with R9 mini receiver: 82g

I did add some ~0.75mm wafer spacers to boost the stack up and give myself room to place the receiver under the stack. There didn't seem a designed place to put it, and it seemed the best spot. After placing these in I had to be very ginger with the lower screws holding the stack in to avoid stripping - I believe they were m1.5 screws straightaway up the stack, but that's just eyeballing it.

The build: Software

First, it does run Betaflight. Second, DO NOT FLASH IT TO 3.5. You will lose your LED strip control. After making that mistake, I regressed and got back on with things; Cleanflight 3.4.2 works well with it; it originally had Betaflight 3.4.1. If you check the Omnibus F3 Betaflight Wiki there's some CLI feature settings that are supposed to be able to enable the LED strip; however this did not work for me. Anyway, when flashing use the Omnibus target - it's just a variant of a pretty standardized Omnibus F3 flight controller.

SmartAudio needs to be enabled on UART 1, and Serial RX on UART 3. Initially, the loop timing was also set to 2kHz which seems somewhat slow, but the chip used is pretty underpowered. If you have a record of the initial setting of UART 2, or a backup of the initial setup please let me know - mine didn't save correctly for some reason.

Review

So far, so good. Assembly was trivial assuming you weren't taking the whole thing apart to document and look up parts like I did. The use of a subpar FC and poor soldering methods on the ESC (I mean, look at all that spatter! And that's after I cleaned off a bunch!) are a bit odd, but it's a decent tradeoff given they can just QC the whole thing, throw out the bad boards, and keep the good ones - probably at a fraction of the price of what their normal market is interested in - honestly, I don't expect the same kind of quality in a CF prop or that costs the same as an entire drone, and I don't think anyone else does either - you're hoping to get a bit of that T-Motor flash, and a bit of an edge over your standard E-Max, and a really good 20x20 FC runs as much as a really good 30x30 FC. So I think they've picked a decent route; and they couldn't have predicted Betaflight's decision to mess around with the LED strip stuff. And LEDs are just shiny stuff anyway and this will likely give the Betaflight/Cleanflight guys a great reason to get it patched up quickly - or I may even do it myself. The only thing that's really lacking is the camera. It's pretty rough - maybe it wouldn't be so bad if I weren't used to recent runcam's, but there's a lot of light bleed from the LEDs, the lens and coatings struggle with contrast mirroring across the image, and the sensor just falls apart when it comes to giving you some sort of visibility in low light conditions (ie, indoors for winter racing).

So, it's a pretty well constructed toy; it's durable, they put some thought into it, it's got motors and CF from T-Motor which is why I bought it, and the rest of the stack is good enough to just go out and fly with and they made it nice and modular so that you can swap it when you want. For the price it's a great deal, it's really light, it's very durable, and there's really a minimal amount of upgrading you need to do to it to feel on par with a modern race/acro drone.

Anyway, have a look at the photos below; I'll post a bit more tomorrow once I have some properly sized batteries - I was only able to source a 2s/1100mAh today, which flew like a rock. I think 3s/500mAh range is going to be more into the ideal range.