Today I’ll be reviewing and flying the Black Mamba V2

What’s A Black Mamba?

The Black Mamba is actually a type of snake, but that’s not why we’re here. The Black Mamba we’re talking about today is a ready-to-fly drone for sale, designed with FPV in mind. It comes in a few different versions. You can buy it from quadrysteria as a quadcopter kit, ready-to-fly, bind-and-fly or just the frame itself. I got the bind-and-fly version, since I already have a transmitter. Whatever version you get, none of them come with a lipo battery, so you’ll have to use your own or buy a 3 or 4 cell lipo from somewhere like Hobby King.

When I received my Mamba in the mail, it was very well packed. Nothing seemed like it had any issue during shipping. It came almost completely assembled. All I had to do was mount the props and setup the flight controller with my receiver. Other then the props, it came with a few stickers, some camera mounting hardware, velcro for the battery and a nice user manual. The manual went over all of the things that needed to be done before flight, including setting up the flight controller and mounting the props correctly. the only thing that it didn’t explain was how to use all of the extra camera mounting hardware.

First Flight

After getting it setup (which didn’t take long at all) I took it for a maiden flight. It flew “ok” but there was a lot of vibration. I could tell that when the props got to a specific RPM the whole frame made this very loud “buzzing” sound. The source of the vibration was coming from the cheap props that it came with, although I think the cause of the loud sound may have been the carbon fiber tubes amplifying the sound of the vibration. The quadcopter also seemed to slightly throttle up and down without any input.

I then ordered some 8×5 E-props. After putting the new props on, all of the issues I had before were completely eliminated. It flew very smooth and still had a lot of power. I had a QAV400 with the same motors, props and battery and I can definitely tell that the Mamba has more power. Even with the cheap KK2 board, I was still able to do some pretty sporty turns and flips with no issues. Since the KK2 board has no “D” setting in the PID loop, descents and fast movements have a slight wobble to them, but that’s not a flaw of the frame.

Tilting The Motors

One thing that makes this frame pretty cool, is that the motors can be tilted at a slight angle. just like the TBS Gemini, tilting the motors does a number of things. It should be more efficient while in forward flight, the cameras won’t be as tilted downward in forward flight and it just looks really cool! Surprisingly, other then looking odd when rotating it really doesn’t seem like tilting the motors has any kind of negative effects on how the Black Mamba flies. There are a few adjustments you have to do to the flight controller in order for it to fly properly with the motors how they are, but I’ll probably go over that in another video.

Things I Like

It’s not as heavy as the QAV400.

In the future, the motors can be tilted to reduce drag and make forward flight more efficient.

It surprisingly has a lot of space to mount things.

The video transmitter is protected in the back of the frame

Things I Don’t Like

The CCD camera mount feels like it might brake in a hard crash.

If you use the vibration isolation mount, it mounts farther back from the front of the frame, meaning that the props show up slightly in the video.

The props it comes with are unusable (for me), But it might come with better ones in the future.

My General Conclusion

Over all, I like this quadcopter. It flies good and the build quality looks great. Just change the props and you’ll have no issues! I wouldn’t recommend this frame for shooting professional video, since the props do show up in some situations (not all), but it’s definitely something you should take a look at if you’re looking for a ready-to-fly FPV setup, or you just want an alternative to the QAV400 or Flip360 frames.

The Review Video