TEST: DYS ELF 83mm

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INTRODUCTION

The DYS ELF 83mm is nothing else than a brushless slightly more larger Tiny Whoop FPV machine. Here bye-bye 0615 coreless brushed motors and hello to some 1102/10000KV strong brushless motors. The flight controller is a powerfull F3 board (a minimum nowdays) coupled with a MWOSD module. Associated with motors, we have a 4-in-1 10A BLheli_S/Dshot600 ESC board. The FPV system is based on a 800 CMOS TVL with 170 degrees of FOV and 5.8G 40CH 25mW/200mW VTX. All ingredients sound super promising ….. Let’s check how good (or not) in practice the bundle is.

BOX CONTENT

All elements are well jailed into a foam transportation structure

+ 1 x DYS ELF 83mm
+ 1 x Transmitter (using 4xAA batteries not included)
+ 1 x 600mAh 2S LiPo 25C with JST XH (2.5mm) lead connector
+ 1 x Charger (for 2S & 3S LiPo)
+ 1 x Powerunit for the charger
+ 4 x Spare props (2 CW, 2 CCW)
+ 1 x Instruction manual (English)

OVERVIEW

Let’s check first more precisely the technical elements. Promised flight time about 6min … be sure it’s always overrated.

The main role of buttons and connectors installed bottom but we wil see that in details below.

Bad news in practice the lower carbon frame is 1.25mm of thickness … so really fragile IMHO especially when a lot of stress is transmitted to the lower frame by the ducted system and the motor pods

-FRONT VIEW

The design is cool … the top plastic canopy structure is highly profiled and protecting well both the FPV camera and the 2.4G receiver. The ducted system is not in carbon but made with a flexible plastic a little bit thin IMHO. For indoors flights, I am not sure the system will survice a long time if you crash the ELF on very hard floors.

-SIDE VIEW

Any presence of connector latterally … no visible antenneas as well.

-REAR VIEW

The microUSB port of the SPracing F3 board can be found in rear part of the tail

-UPPER VIEW

-BOTTOM VIEW

Green light are installed in front motor’s pod and red ones in rear.

The motor plastic pods are long and play the role of landing gear. They are build with a super solid transparent plastic.

The drawback of this system in practice is the transmission of a shock impact/hard landing of the kinetic energy into the lower carbon frame structure. It’s advised to install some foam circles as landing pads. It will ammortize the shocks.

The battery plastic tray is jailing perfectly the 600mAh battery

but surpringly the 5.8G antenna is jailed between the FC and this plastic tray. More the feed antenna point is almost located in the middle. It means in practice, it’s super hard to install the 5.8G vertically down without sacrifying the plastic battery tray…. It’s a real drawback since most of the 200mW power will be absorbed or block by the frame carbon structure….

To select the VTX power, you have two small pads installed nearby the VTX button. If they are soldered togather, 200mW is selected (default) if not it’s 25mW

As you can see, the 200mW output power is preselected by default. The 5positions connector is another JST SH model with a pitch of 1mm. This connector represents a UART port and is usefull of you want to upgrade the MWOSD firmware.

As main power lead connector, a non classic JST XH 2.5mm connector far from the classic JST red one.

At least you can insert a normal JST connector but be aware with the polarisation to not cook your machine

On the other side, we can find the VTX button to select the Vfreq (red light) and the Vband (blue light)

40 channels are supported and in practice we have a 25mW/200mW VTX set by default on 200mW.

To select the Vfreq, you need first to short press the button. The red light will flash from one to eight times corresponding the column index of the previous table. A short press will incremente the column index. If you need to change the Vband, you will need to long press (more than 3s) until the blue light is here. Short press one more time and the blue light will flash betwwen one up to five time correspondly to the current selected Vband. short press to incremente the Vband. After 10s of inactivity, the selection mode is turned off and the last setting automatically saved.

-WEIGHT

Motors and props

Some 1102 brushless motors announced to spin at 10 000 Kv. In practice, there are really powerfull…. even for a 2S system. It’s great positive point of the DYS ELF

During my testing, after the first flight, one motor stopped to work. A short probably in the wiring

but I managed to fix it

LiPo

Camera module

The 800TVL CMOS camera is well jailled into the profiled canopy module. We have a suepr wide angle lens installed, announced to be 170 degrees.

For me it’s a lot for outdoors flights … but adquate for indoors training.

Disassembling

Remove the five screws installed on the bottom side to access to the upper side

Two 3 positions JST connector. The front is for the FPV camera while the rear is for the receiver with SBUS connection

A buzzer is here and installed on front nearby the FPV camera plug.

The camera is installed on front without the possibility to set the tilt orientation angle. Rear to him a FrSky D8 receiver with SBUS connection.
Notice the 2.4G antenna is installed horrizontally not a good solution to extend the control range. The antenna mod is advised to do, i.e. drill a hole in the top canopy in order
to install the antenna vertically

Transmitter

UNBOXING, ANALYSIS, BINDING, CONFIGURATION AND DEMO FLIGHT

CONCLUSIONS

PROS

+ Great Flyer
+ Powerfull Machine even in 2S
+ Good FPV cam
+ Well tuned out of the box
+ Real RTF
+ MWOSD
+ Good FrSky D8 transmitter included in the RTF packaging
+ ~5min of flight time

CONS

– Fragile carbon lower frame
– Fragile Prop guard
– 5.8G antenna location
– No RSSI feedback in OSD
– No standart battery lead connector

This quadcopter have been courtesy provided by Banggood in order to make a fair and not biased review. I would like to thank them for this attitude.
You can find it actually for 165USD at https://www.banggood.com/DYS-83mm-Micro-Brushless-FPV-Racing-Drone-F3-BLheli_S-Dshot-5_8G-25MW-48CH-VTX-BNF-RTF-p-1132509.html

Cet article TEST: DYS ELF 83mm est apparu en premier sur Drone-Maniac !!!!!!!.

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