TBS Powercube Elite Bundle

It has arrived in the stores and I wanted to take a look at it because it’s flat and includes so many components (check out the manual). At first sight it makes your builds very easy but there are of course downsides.

TBS Elite Bundle
Elite Bundle Parts
ESC Extension Board
TBS Colibri FC Top
TBS Colibri FC Bottom
TBS PDB Top
TBS PDB Bottom
Isolation Board
1.45cm
4.9cm
6cm
TBS Elite Bundle

What’s great about the bundle (first sight)?

  • It includes pretty much everything you’ll need. PDB with current sensor + VTX with OSD and of course the FC Colibri Race 2.0.
  • It is very nicely designed with a very flat form factor of 1.45cm height (the top of the white connectors). It nicely fits into the ImpulseRC Alien 5″ frame.
  • You can integrate Crossfire easily and get a very compact long range system which can be configured over OSD (PIDs, VTX, camera).

What’s NOT great (first sight)?

  • The ESC extension board is placed pretty high in the tower so the ESC wires have to be placed high in the air which will cause trouble while flying. The chance of hanging on trees with wires soldered that high are pretty damn high. You can’t decide to move components up and down. So you can’t move the ESC board to the bottom. The ESC board has to be soldered to the FC.
  • TBS used MPU6500 gyro, which is known to be rather noisy when compared to MPU6000. This may cause trouble when tuning the kwad.
  • The price seems very high. USD130 is too much for FC (normally ~USD30), OSD (normally ~CHF5), PDB (normally ~CHF10) and VTX (normally ~USD35) and the components normally cost about USD80 all together. I think USD100 would be a great deal for the bundle.
  • I don’t get why TBS is including that strange/uncommon SMA connector. For my ImpulseRC Alien build (and pretty much every other build) I will need standard right angled SMA or RP-SMA connector.
  • I have no idea whether the UFL connector on the VTX will hold. It popped out in my hands and I did not even pull on it. I suggest to use a bit of hot glue to secure it.

Now it’s about to wait for the other kwad components to arrive.

Alien 4″ Update

The alien now has sexy tubes for RX antennas and is equipped with the XSR (fits better) instead of the X4R-SB. It flies really well with the OMNIBUS F3 AIO Pro. I am selling this monster so get in touch with me if you’re interested!

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SBUS + Telemetry with OMNIBUS F4

There are some things you have to know before using a FrSky SBUS receiver like the FrSky X4R-SB or FrSky XSR on Airbot’s OMNIBUS flight controllers with F405 MCUs.

Enabling UARTs in Betaflight UI

To enable desired UART ports you may need to take following steps after a putting the newest firmware version onto your board.

  1. Go to the configuration tab and select RX_SERIAL. After this save + reboot. Connect to the board over the same COM port.
  2. Now in the ports tab UART1 (or any other missing UART) should be visible. Select Serial RX for it. Save + Reboot. Reconnect to the board.
  3. Now again, like in step 1, go to the configuration tab and choose RX_SERIAL and SBUS for your receiver. Save + Reboot. Reconnect to the board.

After doing all of the above go to the receiver tab and take a look at stick input from your transmitter.

Telemetry

Since we can’t make use of “set telemetry_inversion = ON” on the OMNIBUS with the F405 MCU, there are 2 options to get telemetry working.

  1. Use external hardware inverter (not so sexy for tight builds).
  2. Solder a wire to your receiver to get inverted signal (see pictures for XSR and X4R-SB).

After soldering the wire connect it to TX pin of UART6 or UART3.

 

X4R-SB
XSR

Airbot FCs Video Wiring

I’m sure this tip will be useful for some of you out there who use Airbot’s fantastic flight controllers like the OMNIBUS F3 AIO Pro or OMNIBUS F4 AIO and have some trouble with flickering or disappearing OSD.

To get clean video without noise you actually have three options (to power the camera).

  1. Get clean power from a PDB with some kind of filtering.
  2. Get clean power from OMNIBUS FC.
  3. Get clean power from your VTX (video transmitter).

My choice was to get the 5V for the camera from my VTX because it delivered very clean power and the video was perfectly clear on my previous builds with Foxeer TM25 (40CH 5.8G 25/200/600mW Switchable VTX). However I had the problem that my OSD from OMNIBUS F3 Pro was flickering when applying throttle. It turned out that the ground circuit is not closed properly. After fixing that I had extremely clean video and no OSD issues at all (see wiring picture).

Video Wiring

Please note that this is not a workaround for something that is broken on the FC. It’s just a fix for something I messed up.

Sunset Surfing

The Colors Of Cold

8kHz/8kHz 4″ ImpulseRC Alien

Shout out to Airbot for providing the OMNIBUS F4 for this “alien on steroids” build.

Steroids I
Steroids II
Steroids III

Featuring EMAX red bottoms 2600KV and Racerstar 30A V2 BLHeli_S ESCs.

Airbot OMNIBUS F3 Pro

Airbot released the pro version of his OMNIBUS F3 flight controller and it’s even more outstanding. You can get it directly from Airbot.

OMNIBUS F3 Pro I
OMNIBUS F3 Pro II
OMNIBUS F3 Pro III
OMNIBUS F3 Pro IV
OMNIBUS F3 Pro Pinout II
OMNIBUS F3 Pro Pinout I

What’s so pro about this version?

  • direct battery input 2-4S (SBEC instead of LDO)
  • current sensor
  • filtered power for VTX and camera
  • you can choose barometer

Of course you get a bunch of the usual OMNIBUS features.

  • STM32 F303 MCU, Runs Betaflight 3.0
  • SBUS/PPM input
  • 8 motors output
  • standard 36x36mm sizing, mount holes 30.5×30.5mm
  • SPI sensor MPU6000
  • SD card slot
  • 5V 3A SBEC

Firmware

The flight controller ships with Betaflight 3.0 but you should flash at least 3.1 to get the buzzer working. With Betaflight 3.1 you can additionally get LEDs working over PWM5.

Flow Hunting

4K Finesse

This is so sick that I’m watching it over and over again.