$125 drone from AliExpress: HOW GOOD COULD IT BE? transcript

[snorts] This 7-in drone costs $125 off of AliExpress. $125. That's a preposterously low price for a 7-in drone off of AliExpress. So, like, how good could it be? That is what we're going to find out today. I'm Joshua Bardwell. You're going to learn something today. Here's what motivated me to make this video. I was cruising AliExpress looking for bargains as I often do and I saw $125 for a 7-in drone and like I just assumed it must be terrible.

I know that a lot of the stuff on AliExpress is extremely inexpensive and extremely bad. But I also know that if you're a careful shopper, you can get decent stuff at a decent price. So, I decided to put my money where my mouth was and find out which of those things this is. Now, I've already made a video where I built this drone. This is not going to be that video. If you want to watch me build this drone and get any sort of insights that I have from the building process, then I'll put a link in the video description below and you can go check that video out.

In this video, we're just going to evaluate this kit like as a reviewer and try to decide if it's worth you maybe picking it up. So, where should we start? This is $125 at least at the time that I bought it. I'll put a picture of the product listing and my order receipt up here on screen. You can see I spent my own money on this. It's $125 and uh I it was like $135 $140 all up including shipping to the United States.

I did not pay any tariff on it. I don't know how that was managed, but I'm basically into this thing for $135 $140. Uh uh except also it didn't come with a receiver. That's kind of normal that uh a ready tofly kit won't come with a receiver cuz you're going to buy whatever receiver you want that fits your controller. So add another $15 or $20 for an Express Alerts receiver [snorts] and all in you're looking at about $160, which is still a preposterously low price as long as it's not a total piece of trash.

Let's look at the parts. The motors are 2807,300 KV, and that is a pretty typical size for a 7-in drone. A place where they might have cheaped out would be to get much smaller or much cheaper, poor quality motors. At least on visual inspection, these motors look fine, and the size of 2807 and the KV of 1300 is just about right. You could sometimes see 7-in builds with uh motors closer to like a 1700 KV if they want to be a little punchier.

So, we could expect that this will probably fly a little bit more like a cruiser than a freestyle monster, but a 7-in Cruiser is certainly a perfectly valid application for a 7 in. What about the flight controller in the ESC? The flight controller is an F405 based on the Omnibus F4 SD target, and that is a blast from the past. If you've been in the FPV world long enough, a lot of Chinese flight controllers use that target for a long, long time.

I guess some of them still do. The short version of the story is that that is a perfectly capable flight controller. You might rather have an F7 or an H7 flight controller to get you a little bit more processing speed and a little bit more capabilities, but ultimately an F405 flight controller is going to do everything that you need it to do. You might be a little bit short on UARTs. There are three available UARTs. Uh so you have a receiver, you have your video transmitter, and you have one other thing like a GPS, and then you're going to kind of run out of UARTs. basically have anything you would ask it to do.

In terms of processor speed, it's not the fastest, but it'll run a Dshot 300. It'll run 4K PID loop. And basically, I doubt you're going to see the difference of how this thing flies versus how like a faster processor flies. On the other hand, if you wanted to do really cutting edge stuff, like if you had an H7 uh processor on the flight controller, you could probably put RG Pilot on it. This isn't going to be that. You're going to be running Beta Flight and oh probably there's an INAF target for Omnibus, but that's probably going to be about it.

The ESC is a 60 amp BL S ESC. It did come with Blle S on it, and I did flash it to Blue J firmware so that it could do birectional D-shot. That's all in my build video if you want to see me go through the process. There were a couple little quirks with getting everything put together, but ultimately I have what is basically a flying drone. Well, I haven't flown it yet, but I think it's going to fly. The video transmitter is rated for one watt output, and about the only complaint I have about it is that it comes with this terrible, terrible antenna.

It's like the worst in the world, but it's also certainly not the best. Uh, if you wanted to put $20 more, say, into it, you would get a circular polarized antenna, and you'd probably get better range. But we're going to fly this thing with this stock antenna and see. I'll bet it'll perform better than you'd think. I don't know. I guess we're going to find out. All in all, I feel like we have more than $140 worth of parts here.

Just looking superficially at the build quality, at the thickness of the carbon, at the finishing of the carbon, the flight controller, the VTX, and everything. Like if you were to try to go buy the cheapest parts you could think to buy, you probably would come in higher than $140 and probably would have worse quality stuff at least on the bench cuz again we got to fly it and that'll be the final test. Um I did smoke check this.

I have smoke checked this. It passed the smoke check. I just plugged it in and it just fried. What fried? I guess it must be the ESC fried. The ESC looks fine. Where did the fire come from? Where did the fire come from? There was definite fire. Oh, the flight controller. Yeah. No, I see. The flight controller absolutely took One of the voltage regulators. Yeah. All righty. Well, [laughter] oh man. Do I buy another flight controller and put it on there?

I mean, that's what I got to do, right? I got to go back to the vendor. I got to get them to send me like two more flight controllers and swap it out and see if that was a fluke. Like this battery. It was just at 21 volts. 20 uh 20 26 volts. It was just 6s. 25.1 volts. I tested it on the bench with a smoke stopper and uh and a power supply, 25 volts, 26 volts, whatever it was. It was fine. Passed the smoke check. I plugged it in on the bench multiple times as I tested the motors and the ESC and I did the Beta Flight configuration and today I plugged it in and it took Okay.

So, um I'm not giving up, but it does mean it's going to be like 3 weeks before you see this video cuz I'm I'm getting another flight controller. We're going to find out if this is a fluke or not. Damn. What are you going to do? All right. It's been like two to three weeks. Uh I've ordered a new flight controller. Uh have put the new flight controller on. configured it from scratch because the old flight controller was completely dead.

Wouldn't power it up from USB. Could not pull the configuration off of it. Uh, and I have done all the configuration using a 3S battery so that if this thing smokes, at least it'll smoke on camera. And right now, we're going to plug it in and either it's going to smoke and that's going to be the end of the video or we're going to get to fly it. Here goes nothing. How do I keep my hands out of the way in case instead of smoking it like the ESC goes full power?

I don't like this. Okay. Well, let's fly it. Oh my god, it's flying. I can't believe this. I can't believe it's happening. Um, I've got the video transmitter set to max power. Uh, don't pay any attention to those question marks in the upper right hand upper leftand corner of the screen. It's on max power. We're on race 8. Oh, I didn't change the rates. These are Betaflate default rates. Whatever. The camera is it's okay.

It's getting a little overexposed and kind of blowing out the highlights, but it's not the worst I've ever seen. Let's see how the camera works as we get into somewhere a little bit darker. See, we got decent shadow detail in here. The exposure algorithm isn't too obnoxious. Highlights get a little blown out, but then they they recover and the exposure adjusts pretty easily. I have a bug on my head. Hold on. Let's see how it flies.

Let's give it a little pushing. This is Betaflight uh 2026.6 default PIDs. Might want a little more uptilt. Um honestly, that's not bad. It's flying pretty nice. Oh gosh. I wonder if this camera has latency. That didn't feel great. Well, it turns out that the latency of the camera is just fine. Uh I did some testing using uh two LEDs. Basically, you flash one of the LEDs, you point the camera at the LED, and then you look into the screen of the goggles, and you see, let's see here, a good example.

So, right here, if I go left one frame, the LED is off. Here, the LED turns on. And then we're just going to look at how long it takes the screen to show that LED. 1 2 3. There we go. So, it started showing up. We can see the average here is 8.6 milliseconds, which is about as good as any FPV system can get. Don't get too hung up on the min and the max. That just is some variance in when the app actually detects that the screen has changed.

The average is really the only thing the app can measure accurately. So, then what was screwing me up and making me feel like it was flying weird? There is something about this camera that was doing it. Check out this frame from the DVR. Does this look like it is squished a little bit? Does it look a little squished? It looks squished because this camera is a 16-9 widescreen camera. Yes, analog cameras can be 16-9 widescreen.

And then the goggles are displaying it as a 43 camera, which is what most analog cameras are. And I've had this happen before that when I'm flying, I just like something is off, but I can't quite tell what it is. And then as soon as I go back and look at the DVR, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, no, it's a widescreen camera." So, what I needed to do was set the goggles to display a 16:9 widecreen image. And then it would have looked like this and everything would have been fine.

That I think when you hear me in the rest of this video say, "Yeah, I think the latency is not right." There's a thing that happens where as the image rotates, it goes from being squished one way to being squished the other way. And it makes rolls feel super super weird. And um it's because the aspect ratio is mismatched. So it's not the latency, though. And I could have fixed it if I had only noticed it while I was flying.

A little more up tilt on this so that we can really push it cuz like the idea here is we want to really stress test this. I only charged one pack. Nice little bobbles there as we go to low throttle. That's probably nothing that some pit tuning couldn't sort out. Oh yeah, lots of bobbles. The video transmitter could be a lot better. I'm seeing a lot of this breakup here. Uh the antenna is probably not helping us, but overall I don't think it's like horrible.

It does feel like the camera has latency. I can't I guess I could test that objectively now that I've gotten to fly it. As far as the range on the VTX goes, I really need one of those digit one of those filters on this to be honest with you. But the VTX doesn't seem to have horrible range, you know, given what I normally expect to see. I realize I haven't gone very far, but I fly around here a lot. Honestly, I'm just jerking it around here.

I'm not trying to fly nice and smooth. I'm trying Woo. Just a little bit of sort of wobbliness. It's the pit tune is I think it's the pit tune could be better. Probably could fix that with some tweaking on the pit tune. I mean, I'm impressed with how it flies. Considering it's a 7 in, it's doing pretty good. It's un It's not pid tuned. Camera is weak. It's a little hard to see when the like when you get up high and the ground blows out like that, it's a little hard to see what you're diving into.

The motors in ESC in terms of their Oh. Oh, yeah. We got We got latency for sure. Did I break it? Oh, I think I lost the battery. I bet it's fine. We'll find out. No fire. That's good. I uh I ejected the battery. Uh the battery strap didn't break. It just came loose cuz I only put a single battery strap on there cuz just, you know, whatever. Um no damage to the frame. Standoffs are not bent. I really think if you wanted to upgrade this, replace these standoffs with shorter standoffs.

Oh, then you'd have to come up with a different way of doing the camera cuz the this plates are integral. Damn. Then you lose some of the rigidity. But having the standoffs this long means that there's a lot more leverage when you get a racking moment and it's going to want to bend those. Um, yeah, arms are fine, motors are fine. Wasn't a hard crash, but it did survive. Camera ejected one of the screws. H. Okay. Well, [snorts] should you buy it?

[gasps] It's very inexpensive for what you get. It flies pretty decent. The video transmitter is pretty decent. If you got this and it didn't blow up on you, I would feel like you would be getting your money's worth and maybe a little bit more. You could point to things to improve. like the camera latency. It feels low. It feels high. I'm going to check that, but I'm going to go ahead and record this first and I'll just insert that for you.

I feel like some people who buy this will feel like they got their money's worth. The big question is just how many flight controllers you blow up before you find a good one. I blew up one and then the next one I had was fine. I I will also say the one I bought was as close to the same flight controller as I could find, but when I got it, it was clearly like Rev 2 or Rev 3. It had the same pad layout, but there were a few little things about it that were different.

I wonder if it's upgraded. I'll put a link to all that stuff in the video description below. I don't want to say I recommend it. [snorts] This is not enough data to say I recommend it, but I am I'm pleasantly surprised with how it flew and it didn't blow up and all that thrashing. It flew pretty good. I think it could be pretty good for the money if you get it at the right price. There's links below. They're not even affiliate links because AliExpress affiliates are kind of like they're just links if you want to find it.

I'll see you in the next one.