Review: Racerstar & Airbot AirF7 flight controller

Airbot, known manufacturer of the quality Flight controllers and ESC’s, and Racerstar, known brand of the Banggood, together released the F7 MCU based Flight Controller AirF7. 

Specifications

Racerstar AirF7

Package contains the Racerstar AirF7 FC, silicone rubber grommets and 8-pin JST-SH 1.0mm cable for connecting 4in1 ESC board.

There is the user manual included in the package.

User manual is realy low quality, printed with some angle offset and with many spelling and grammar mistakes. I havent heared of such a thing as “Speical designed filiter system “Good Dream”” 🙂

User Manual states that the BEC on the right is FC BEC (5V)

But in reality the right BEC is Camera BEC (9V). You can clearly see the markings CAM_BEC on the PCB:

Actually the AirF7 user manual is based on the Airbot F7 user manual, but Racerstar should have done it better.

Airbot F7 user manual: https://store.myairbot.com//media/iverve/uploadpdf/1561739006_80127-AirbotF7-0505.pdf

Racerstar AirF7 user manual: http://myosuploads3.banggood.com/products/20190909/20190909214037RacerstarairF7.pdf

Also AirF7 user manual has no pinout information, so I have copied the pinout scheme from the Airbot F7 and made the Racerstar AirF7 board pinout scheme.

The resource table

Flight Controller in details

This AirF7 flight controller is stacked with features and surprises. Lets look at them.

The view of the flight controller top side.

The view of the back side

There is micro USB and 8-pin JST-SH 1.0mm socket for connecting to the 4in1 ESC on the right side of the board. You can find the pinout of the socket in pinout scheme above. There is BlackBox Flash 16MB memory chip right behind the USB socket.

Whole row of the pads for LEDs and UART 6 pads on the bottom part of the board. GND, 5V and LED control pads for programmable LED strips and lights. F.Port (Inverted) , 5V, GND, TX1 (uninverted) and 3.3V pads for connecting various receivers that need inversion (SBUS, FPort) or doesn’t need it. Also free TX6 and RX6 pads for UART 6 are available.

On the left side there are UART 3 pads and I2C interface pads. There is a undocumented Barometer on this FC, right behind the UART 3 pads! There are three status LEDs and buzzer pads. The connector in the middle is the SPI interface socket for connecting the External Gyro, R9MM-FC or RXSR-FC receivers.

On the top side of the board there are Camera GND, Power, Video and SmartAudio pads. Also VTX GND, Power , CameraControl and Video pads. You can see Airbot AB7456 OSD chip behind the Camera pads and AO4606 Mosfet VTX power switch behind the VTX pads. The Airbot AB7456 OSD chip uses less power, is tolerant of wider voltage swings and twice as much nvram than the commonly used MAX7456 chip. There is LED indicator besides the VTX pads to indicate the VTX power status. LED is off if the VTX power is swithed off (VTX PIT mode).

On the bottom side of the board there are GND, +5 and TX3, RX3 pads for direct soldering the Crosfire Nano or FrSky XM/XM+ receivers.

In the middle of the bottom side there is a place for soldering the optional Bluetooth module. It would use UART6 for the communication with

There are ESC solder pads in the normal and reversed order for soldering convenience.

There are Bootloader pads next to the 9V BEC, marked BOOT0.

Weight of the board is 8.6 grams.

 

Configuration

Racerstar AirF7 Betaflight target is AIRF7 (RAST) and is available from Betaflight 4.1.0.

There are some notes in the product page regarding the firmware, but I think these are outdated now:

Because the firmware is provisional, for 9V BEC there have 2 steps to switch on :
1. Please type in CLI as:
RESOURCE SERIAL_RX 4 NONE
set pinio_box = 40,41,42,43
aux 2 40 2 1600 2100 0
resource PINIO 1 A10
save

2. Then use AUX 3, and the range must cover 1500
we don’t know if betaflight can put this setting in the released firmware, but if it’s happened the 9V BEC not working ,you know how to resource .

Actually the board comes with RealPIT feature preconfigured on AUX3 channel.

VTX power is switched on when AUX3 is in the range. You can adjust the range or AUX channel to your needs.

[To be continued]

Available @ https://www.banggood.com/Racerstar-Airbot-airF7-F722-RealPit-Flight-Controller-5V3A-9V3A-BEC-wOSD-For-FPV-Racing-RC-Drone-p-1547585.html

Disclaimer: This item was supplied by Banggood for a fair and unbiased review. Banggood never asked for a positive review and never infuenced my opinion in any way. I’m trying my best to stay uninfluenced and give only my own opinion. All affiliate links if there are any help me purchase items for future reviews.