What are seven inches good for? // IFLIGHT CHIMERA 7 PRO

foreign all the way out for this one today folks we're looking at something a little bit different than the type of quadcopter that I usually fly as my daily driver I love to fly five inch freestyle quads but there's a whole lot of other stuff out there including this this is the iflight Chimera 7 Pro and this is going to be interesting for a couple different reasons number one because it's a seven inch quadcopter so we're going to look at the differences between the way five inch and seven inch fly and think about what might make you want to choose a seven inch over a five inch or something else but also because this is one of iflite's new generation of frames they've updated their whole frame lineup mostly to be able to carry the new DJI 03 air unit and we'll take a look at the special changes they made to accommodate that but we'll also just take a look at the ways in which iflite is trying to be more than just a typical f PV hobby company and a little bit more like a consumer Products Company and whether that's actually a good thing it's got to be a good thing right I'm Joshua bergwell and you're going to learn something today I've got a prop button wrong I have screwed up I put the props on wrong so I'm gonna go fix that uh so we're going to start this flight test with a demonstration of the kind of thing that a seven seven and a half inch Class quadcopter is good at and that is smooth cruising and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to fly straight without moving the throttle and I'm going to raise the throttle slowly and we can look for vibrations at any throttle position there's Full Throttle and we'll come back down again and I wasn't moving the sticks at all through any of that so any Vibra vibration that we see or anything like that we uh know is because of the motors or the frame design and of course if it's smooth then that's a good indication of the quality of this quad I don't know yet I haven't looked at it I'm just looking at it I didn't see anything in the goggles in this style of flying uh how much flight time will you get well I am using a 3 000 milliamp hour lithium polymer battery and the best way to fly for long flight time is to use a lithium ion battery like an 18650 cell radio master has a 6 000 milliamp hour lithium ion you can fly this guy with it's going to be a little less Nimble than it is here although as you'll see in a little bit it's not that Nimble just because it's a seven inch but I get about 10 or 12 minutes of flight off of this a lithium ion would go significantly further because it can go to a lower voltage the first thing I notice about the iflight Chimera 7 is that it doesn't look like a typical fpv quadcopter usually looks it continues the trend that started with the iflight evoke of putting side plates on the quad and there's some argument that these side plates help protect against the Ingress of dirt and dust for example here is my iflight evoke and you can see quite a lot of dirt there on the outside and of course if those side plates weren't there that dirt would be on the inside the main thing that I think these side plates do is they give the quadcopter more of a feel like it is a finished consumer product and not a hobby product that someone has cobbled together here's another example of that the LEDs on the side yes they are functional in a way they indicate battery voltage when the battery is fully charged they're green and if I turn down the voltage of my power supply here we can see them go from Orange to red but it also they just make this look like a cool consumer product and here's why I think this could be a good thing fpv if it wants to grow it needs to become accessible to more of a mainstream audience I know that not everybody agrees that that's actually a desirable goal a lot of people feel like it would be better if fpv stayed small and if things like needing to know how to solder and set up a flight controller were a Gateway that kept more casual people out I'm not here to sort of engage with that argument but if you feel like fpv needs to grow in order to survive then it needs to be more accessible and more appealing to people in the mainstream and they are going to really like a drone more like this as opposed to something that looks more like a hobbyist soldered it together but this does come with some downsides let's see how many screws I have to take out into order to like open this up and do some basic maintenance on it all right that's eight screws and now we can lift the top plate off and take a look at the insides but even then I'm not sure how easy it's going to be to work on this in its current state like I could maybe get in here and solder wires to the top of the flight controller and that's pretty much it in order to really get in here we have to take these side plates off and that's going to involve well I am not sure exactly how many of these screws you have to remove to take the side plates off but I can tell you that the original version of this that they sent me the O3 air unit actually didn't work not iflite's fault dji's fault apparently but in trying to repair it I took the side plates off and I broke one of them because I missed a screw and it kind of couldn't figure out how to get it off and I kind of tugged on it the wrong way and it it's just kind of a level of I feel dumb saying this I was about to say a level of hassle that I'm not used to with fpv drones which for anyone in fpv the inherent hilarity of that statement should be out obvious let's guess I should say it's a different kind of Hassle and it's the kind of hassle you get when what you're dealing with is a consumer product that has actually been carefully pieced together in a meaningful and thoughtful way instead of just slapped together and yet still I'm I'm not sure how I feel about it the flight controller is the iflight blitz f722 it's got an f722 processor in there as the name suggests and that's not the absolute fastest that betaflight runs today but it's fast enough to run really anything that betaflight asks of it it does ship with betaflight on it if you wanted to do more autonomous flying betaflight has very basic return to home that's it but if you wanted to do stuff like Waypoint missions loiter in place altitude hold and other GPS assisted flight modes to kind of make it Fly more like a DJI style quad the inav firmware can do all of that stuff and this flight controller can run INF we can't see it under there but the ESC is the iflake blitz E55 that's a 55 amp ESC and some people might be surprised to see if 55 amp ESC being used on a seven inch seven and a half inch build and the same 55 amp ESC being used on smaller five inch builds there's two things going on there one is that the seven inch build is usually tailored more towards cruising and efficiency than raw power so you can actually find cases where the larger Motors and larger props are actually drawing far less current than a smaller faster quadcopter the other thing going on here is that the esc's we use in our smaller quadcopters like five inches oftentimes they're dramatically oversized for what our batteries can actually deliver and it's nice to have that buffer but it's not especially necessary especially for more of a sort of a long range Cruiser quad like this that we're not going to be just slamming the throttle all day long so I think 55 amps is plenty I'm sure iFly got that right I am always so impressed with iflight's attention to detail they build a damn good quadcopter we've just got perfect solder joints here there's so much thought put into this uh like the way this wire is run here to sort of keep it from getting snagged or whatever I believe this is the GPS wire and it appears to have shielding on it uh the GPS got locked very very quickly it took about 5 min minutes to get locked the first time I was at a new location and then after that it would lock within 30 seconds or a minute after power up and it would easily get 8 10 12 satellites or even more once I think I saw 18 satellites which I personally have never seen on a betaflight quadcopter mostly because the ones I usually fly are so small and and it puts the GPS close to a bunch of electrical noise this little guy here what is this I've never seen one of these on a quadcopter before but I think I figured out what it is so when you're running 6s batteries and especially really big 6s batteries you can get a great big spark or pop when you first plug the battery in and it kind of freaks people out they just don't like it but also it can cause scorching on your xt60 or in some cases even damage it I think this must be the anti-spark device you can get xt90 connectors with built-in anti-spark capabilities but I don't think anybody makes an xt60 with anti-spark I've looked for it before and wasn't able to find it that was my guess as to what this is and just another example of the kind of thought that iFly puts into these builds it's really hard to get an angle on this with the camera but you can just see in here that iflight have designed a bracket to hold the air 3 air unit and on the bottom of the bracket are some heat dissipation fins there's a space all the way through the bottom of the frame and when the props are spinning air flows through there and keeps the o3r unit cool now don't get me wrong if you are not flying the O3 air unit will overheat I remember one time when I had first I had gone to a new city so the GPS would do take a long time to get a lock and before the GPS got locked the air unit shut down because I wasn't flying so it's still going to overheat but it does mean that when you're flying and when the props are spinning you're not going to have any issue with heat dissipation and these side plates are not going to be an issue one thing that's extremely frustrating about this Frame is that you can't see the LEDs on the O3 air unit and that's partially dji's fault because they stuck the LED like inside the unit you could barely see it when the dang thing isn't inside a frame but like if you weren't sure if your air unit was powering up like you it's not working well is it powering up I don't know you literally have to remove the frame plate or pull the O3 air unit out of the Quad to get that diagnostic information and it's a real that's how I broke the side plate on mine trying to just see the damn LED my flight has also redesigned the front of their frames to hold the o30 unit camera the O3 air unit camera is about 20 millimeters wide whereas a standard fpv camera is about 19 millimeters wide that was true for the previous generation DJI cameras as well but the difference was that they had a normal sized lens so they could poke up between the front uh standoffs and still work the O3 camera is just as wide at its lens as it is at its body and requires a redesign of most frames in order to fit it this is how iflight have approached this I like that they're using this 3D printed plastic insert to actually Mount the camera well the first time that I saw it I said well fine it's got two screws that's fine for the O3 camera but what about all those cameras out there that only have one screw how are they going to mount and clearly what iflate intends is that they or you can swap this out with a different insert that has the appropriate screw holes for whatever camera you're going to use however it doesn't give you a lot of flexibility in terms of the front to back mounting of the camera one of the most important things to do with an fpv camera is have it just forward just far enough forward that you don't see the standoffs in view but not so far forward that it protrudes outward and then it's more likely to get damaged in a crash I've played have designed this perfectly for the O3 camera and presumably all of their bind and flies will also have correct spacing but if you were going to buy one of these frames to do your own build you might need to do just a little bit of adaptation to get the camera exactly where you want it then again on a seven inch hopefully you're not going to be smashing it in too many walls the motors are iflite zing2 2809 in 1250 KV this is a special blacked out version that they put on the Chimera but it's the same motor and it has all the characteristics that make The Zing 2 Motors so desirable 7075 aluminum the harder alloy of aluminum that's going to be more durable unibel design single piece Bell for increased durability titanium motor shaft for lightweight and durability 11 millimeter Japanese NSK bearings and a proprietary o-ring between the top bearing and the motor Bell that helps absorb shock and vibration the brother hobby 2806.5 motor was the first sort of standard seven inch motor there's an interesting question about how big a 7-inch motor really needs to be because people run seven inch props on 2207 2208 Motors that you would normally associate with 5-inch quadcopters the difference is that these bigger Motors are going to have more torque and more responsiveness but more importantly they're going to run at a better place in their efficiency curve you're actually going to get more efficiency and longer flight times on these larger Motors because they're better matched to larger props why is this GoPro turning off in the middle of every flight what is going on GoPro no your battery was fully charged you the battery was fully charged why is uh now as you get into proximity like this the stakes get a lot higher let's just put it that way because this seven inch is not as Nimble as a five inch so if you run into trouble then you're not going to be able to react as quickly and the props are a lot more fragile now these are the HQ 7.5 inch props and maybe there are better ones out there in fact people have told me there definitely are better ones out there but that's what I'm running and I tapped a branch with one of these ones and it exploded and the quad crashed it's oh okay got lucky on that one it's a lot of fun to fly there's something about the sort of inherent stability of a larger quad maybe it's that I know it's got more weight and I'm just flying it differently like even when I start to do little sort of Flippy flop stuff like that I'm just more Ginger with it I'm more careful with it maybe it's that I know it costs eight hundred dollars and if I crash it it's going to hurt to fix but you can rip it oh I'm gonna rip it a little let's let's put a little it definitely doesn't drop as fast wow really smooth do you hear any problems there it definitely doesn't drop as fast as a five inch like here's a Full Throttle punch well we're only at 3.6 volts and here's how far it comes down at zero throttle it drops a lot slower because of the drag of those seven and a half inch props and it's really fun to do kind of flowy freestyle with this [Music] you totally can do it I'm impressed with the tune we're really not seeing any prop wash oscillation [Music] I mean I could probably bring it out but for a seven inch it's pretty good as we drop in here no problem flies really nice [Music] you still want to swoosh around here I am at 3.5 SEC 3.5 volts and you might think oh well the battery's done but I can keep going for as long as I'm not jamming the throttle hello well good maybe it was just an unlucky fluke when I broke that prop because I've smacked a couple props now and haven't gone down [Music] all righty well see if this was a lithium ion pack I could keep going all the way down to 3.0 volts only about six minutes there that's a little shorter than I've been getting not sure why I'm charging up my battery for another go let me show you a couple things iflight have done with the flight controller configuration some of which I like and some of which you'll see the betaflight presets tab is probably one of the coolest and most useful things in betaflight 4.3 it contains code Snippets little chunks of configuration that you can download and put on your flight controller so you want to download a PID tune well you can just pick one and it'll automatically copy it down but dataflite doesn't just distribute their own code Snippets if we go to preset sources you can add your own so for example I have a preset repo where I have presets that I use and I manage it and here's one of the most awesome things ever done in all of fpv ifight has their own preset repo and the reason I say that's awesome is that so many people buy a bind and flight quadcopter and then like they mess around with the configuration or maybe they wipe the configuration uh or they get a quadcopter that they bought from somebody else and they don't know what the configuration is and they want to know how to get that configuration back to factory defaults usually that involves a lot of web searching and trying to find somewhere on the internet that someone has posted the config dump for the quad and sometimes you find it and sometimes you don't but I fight putting these putting all their configurations for all of their quadcopters in this preset repo means that it is so easy to return this to factory defaults if you ever screw it up or if they update it if they update their pid2 and there's something you could do better so I'm actually going to do this right now and now we are back at our factory settings how freaking simple is that every manufacturer of bind and fly quads should do this maybe some of them have if you have and I don't know about it let me know I would love to shout you out if you want to take advantage of this all you need to do is go in your betaflight configurator to preset sources hit add new source and then type in the following you can name it whatever you want I just named mine iflate presets and then the key thing is this URL needs to match and this GitHub Branch needs to match I'll put that stuff down in the video description so you can copy paste it if you're having a little trouble reading it or typing it now that we're back at factory defaults here are some of the things that I like and dislike about this configuration and the very first one is iFly what the f is going on with this OS this is their factory default OSD what is even happening here iflight like was this designed for the original DJI goggles which laid out the OSD a little weird and different that's the only way I can make sense of this because as soon as you show it on the O3 air unit or if this was on analog it just looks like a freaking mess heesh enough said about that iflite ships all of their bind and fly quadcopters with angle mode activated permanently you need to go into the modes Tab and you need to change angle mode if you want to fly an Acro mode so that it is only activated when you have a switch in a certain position and then you'll have a switch that turns angle mode on and off I also noticed that angle that iflate doesn't activate many other common modes that you might want to use including the Beeper mode which makes the motors go or the Beeper it actually has a beeper on it so it's kind of odd that it wasn't shipped to the Beeper mode active makes it go beep beep beep if you're trying to find it because you've crashed or landed somewhere you don't know where it is and another one that well I don't know about this one but the flip crash mode is used it's also commonly known as Turtle mode and it's used to flip the quadcopter over if it's upside down after a crash on the one hand with these seven inch props they're not going to really stand up to a lot of of thrashing around upside down but on the other hand if you did crash and your only option was to try to Turtle mode out to get home you certainly want to have it this is how I set up well this isn't exactly how I set up all my quads but these are the four basic modes I have basically all my quads and I don't uh I don't know at least beeper mode they could have shipped with it right come on the next thing we're going to do is we're going to take this guy back outside and you're going to find out how it got dirt all over its nose but before we do that real quick if at the end of this video you decide that this is a quadcopter you want to buy there are links in the video description and they're not just there for your convenience I mean they're there for your convenience but they're also there because they're affiliate links and what that means is that when you click that link and then go to the store and make any purchase at the store you can buy this you can buy anything before you go shopping find one of my affiliate links click the affiliate link go to the store do all your shopping and check out and I get a little commission doesn't cost you anything literally only thing it costs you is the time to just put bookmark the links it really means a lot it's a small amount per purchase but it adds up because you know I'm don't I won't tell anybody but you know you spend a lot on this hobby so uh yeah give me a cut of that click my affiliate links well okay batteries are charged and we're gonna put it back up in the air and there's two things I want to test the first one is GPS rescue like how well does that freaking work and the second one is stabilization the O3 air unit has built-in stabilization it's turned on right now and if the frame is transmitting too much vibration to the camera then that stabilization won't work right so let's see how it works alrighty so we got 11 sets that's more than enough satellites 12 satellites and the other thing we want to double check before we hit GPS rescue is that the return to home Arrow the direction home arrow is pointing the right direction which it is and the altitude is kind of basically something that makes sense it's not always exactly correct but it's not like wildly off we're going to take it out here and we're gonna kick it in there we go what are we doing we're climbing we are coming home oh yeah we're headed home baby most sorta yeah this is generally the right direction yeah yeah we're here when the lighting is good this camera looks so freaking good but as soon as there's like a wild difference in the lighting like right now then it looks it's like so dark in spots let's give the stabilization a little bit of a work workout and do some flippy flops you can flippy flop this guy if you want to not sure I'd recommend it when you crash not if but when it will not be a good time should we turn the rates up let's turn the rates up oh that's faster oh that's way faster still even with the rates that high it does not really want to rotate does it [Music] but it flies a little more like a freestyle quad oh gosh [Music] oh it came over there man the prop wash handling I've had five inches that didn't have prop wash handling this good this tune is really exceptional [Music] these rates are a little too high for me but I I kind of wanted to make a point see how fast it would spin because of the additional Mass it just won't spin as fast as a five inch even if you try to make it do it I mean maybe it would get there but it's just not as Snappy that's this is fun though just don't feel as Brave to like take risks [Music] because I know if I crash it's going to be expensive and and a difficult repair because of the complexity of the frame can we spank this can I spank anything [Music] it gets up there boy [Music] oh God oh God oh God oh God okay all right all right all right a little battery's hanging in there uh well let's take her inside and see what the damage is it's uh not as bad as I feared maybe I just got really unlucky with that one prop strike that just exploded the proper made me crash I bounced off of a couple branches out there and they didn't explode uh as far as damage to the frame goes there doesn't seem to be any uh let's see arms are still pretty snug oh yeah yeah I mean it was a pretty mild crash site so like what would you expect but still let me get to these bigger quads they get a little more fragile sometimes we got a little dirt caked in here but other than that seems like we're good to go just gotta double check and balance those props am I right who is this quadcopter for like who's Really Gonna Love It because with an asking price for the bind and fly with the O3 air unit over eight hundred dollars you really gotta want this to get into it this Cloud's not really big enough to carry like a cinema camera not even a smaller one like a red Komodo or a Sony Z cam uh and people who fly those tend to like to have octos for redundancy although that's not always the case you usually see something more like a 10 inch platform or something up from there it seems like what a quad like this is really best at is like medium range cruising like you're going to start at the bottom of a maybe not like a whole Mountain but you're gonna start at the bottom of the mountain you're going to fly up to the top and you're going to dive the Ridgeline down you're going to fly along the beach and just fly for what feels like forever uh you know getting this nice long run that kind of smooth longer distance longer flight time flying seems like this where this is really going to excel I also checked the specifications for this and it does seem like it would fit within the specs for Street League if you're not familiar with that streetly drone racing is a spec Racing League where they build seven inch racing drones I know right seven inch racing drones go figure they build seven inch racing drones designed to have similar flight characteristics to like the DRL racer 4. so if you've ever seen drone Racing League and wanted to try that in real life but of course you don't have a DRL racer 4 and they won't let you into a DRL race check out Street League I'll put a link in the video description below you know another thing quadcopter like this might be good at is chasing Vehicles five inch quadcopters are more than fast enough to chase a vehicle but the problem is they're short flight time and something like this could have that extended flight time might be just what the doctor ordered you know it reminds me of a time when I flew the Catalyst Machine Works nine inch America and I chased race cars around an oval track if you missed that video I'll put a link here a card on screen and you can go check it out it was pretty freaking badass we got kicked out after like three packs turns out we weren't supposed to we did I thought we had permission to be there see you there link down below if you can't see the cards for some reason

Channel: Joshua Bardwell

Views: 96,648

Keywords: joshua bardwell, ultimate fpv shopping list, support me on patreon, This is my full time job

Id: LWhPYMqu9gI

Length: 29min 17sec (1757 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022