Flycolor Raptor ESCs

For those following my blog and Facebook page, you know I love testing new products and pushing these to their limits. Today I am going to share my view about the Flycolor Raptopr ESCs. First of all I want to thank Charmant from Flycolor for sending me some units!

Here are the ESCs, that I have tested on my RCbenchmark 1520 Series thrust stand:

Flycolor Raptor 20A

Flycolor Raptor 30A

Flycolor Raptor 390 20A

Flycolor Raptor 390 30A

The Raptor 390 series is equipped with the SiLabs F390 MCU and has slightly different design than normal Raptor series. The new F39x MCU operate at 50MHz and should give the ESC a better performance especially with high-KV motors. The new 390-series has bigger motor pads, so you do not need to care much about damaging the FETs while soldering your motor cables direct to the ESC. The ESCs are now in yellow, instead in white.

You also may wonder what is the difference between the 20A and 30A version: the only one, that I noticed so far is the type of the FETs. The 20A version uses the QM3114M3 by UBIQ Semiconductor. The FETs on the 30A version are by Toshiba – TPN2R703NL.

Personal view: Both FETs are pretty similar, so I am not really sure if there is a real benefit of buying the 30A version.

Details:

Size: 27.35 x 12.3 x 4.92mm (29.11mm for 390-Series)

Weight: 10.1g

No BEC

3-4S LiPo

The 18AWG motor wires are about 95mm long. The ESCs have neither a heat sink nor an external electrolytic capacitor. The ESCs are rated only for 3-4S LiPo batteries, but I have tested these with a 6S LiPo as well, without seeing smoke 😀 If you are going to use the Raptor ESC with 6S LiPo, I will advise to solder a 35V 220uF electrolytic capacitor.

All Flycolor Raptor ESCs come with BLHeli firmware already flashed. Mine have the 14.4 version and “damped light” enabled on default. If you want to change some of the settings or update the firmware, check how to easily do this with the BLHeli passthrough protocol.

Here two more pictures of the down side of the ESCs:

For my thrust tests I decided to go with the new Scorpion MII 2204 2300kv motor, because it is the one that performed the best of all my 2300kv motors. The maximum thrust, that I measured was 892g with the Raptor 390 30A on 4S with 5” HQ prop. As you can see from the picture below there is not much difference regarding the thrust between the different versions. Same for the efficiency: about 2.3g/W at max throttle.

I decided to upload the complete data, so everyone can check the results in details. Please note, that it is only for private use.

Summary: Great manufacturing quality, small size, light weight and very good performance. Personally I will go for the non-390 version, if I am going to use the ESCs with 2300kv motors. If you are planning a setup with high-KV motors (>2500kv), better choose the Flycolor Raptor 390 ESC. It is also available on GearBest as well.

Update: Check the newest build log with the Flycolor Raptor 20A.

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