AirBot Flip F4 flight controller

If you are looking for a good and affordable F4 flight controller, that can run the Raceflight firmware, check out the new AirBot / Flip F4 FC. I previously used the Sparky 2.0 with Raceflight, but decided to hit the trigger for this new flight controller. It is available as Airbot F4, Flip F4 or CC3D Revo F4. However I don´t know if it is a “clone” or just open-source board.

Specification overview:

STM32 F4 MCU running at 168MHz

MPU6000 Gyroscope/Accelerometer

Up to 1.5A BEC

16MB dataflash chip

Spectrum / SBUS / PPM receivers

Size: 36 x 36mm

30.5 x 30.5mm mounting holes

The build quality of this board looks very good and I like the black solder mask. Note that you need to solder the pin headers on your own.

The 16MB flash memory is good for saving some BlackBox flight logs and analysing these on your computer.

The flight controller comes preloaded with Betaflight 3.0.0 firmware. Connecting it with PC/Mac through the USB port works without any problems. Updating the firmware to the latest Betaflight 3.0.1 was done in just few seconds. Use the “Revo” target for this F4 board.

If you want to use the board with Raceflight, download the Raceflight Configurator for Google Chrome, connect the board to your PC/Mac and install the latest “Revo” firmware.

The Airbot / Flip F4 support BLHeli passthrough for easy ESC flashing as well.

There is no way to connect a PWM receiver to the flight controller, but nowadays almost all pilots use SBUS, PPM or Spectrum DSM. I have connected my FrSky X4RSB SBUS receiver, activated the “Serial RX” for UART1 port and it worked like a charm. Getting telemetry on your Taranis using SmartPort should also work, but so far I haven´t tested it.

Additional features:

Buzzer pins

Led strip pins

Voltage meter pins

DFU Boot button

What I like about this flight controller is the integrated 7805 voltage regulator. Thanks to it, you can power the F4 board directly from your LiPo battery, including your receiver as well. Note that the maximum allowed input voltage is 25V.

Summary

Both Betaflight and Raceflight firmware are great and perform awesome on F4 flight controllers, because of the additional processing power of the MCU. The board offers nice features, good connectivity and for the price of 22$ you simply can´t go wrong.

You can also find it on myairbot.com or banggood.com. If you have enjoyed reading this article, like the Facebook page to get more news, reviews and how-to´s.

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