Well, it finally happened. China took one of my designs, removed my logos, renamed it (what was wrong with tinyFISH FC?), and started selling it as their creation: The “Racerstar” F3D8!
But let’s start from the beginning: On November the 21st 2016 I started to blog about my tinyFISH FC. I developed it because I needed something as small and lightweight as it can get for my 30g 1S pepperFISH fpv quadcopter. I shared all design files with the world and wrote instructions on how to assemble and build them on your own. I released the files under the CERN open hardware license. This license allows commercial reproduction — which I am fine with! But not giving me credit and selling it as their own F3D8 design makes me sad. Was it that hard to keep the fishpepper logo?? Well, they did it with my 1S 4in1 ESC as well (they relabeled it to star4 — I liked tinyPEPPER more).
Are you still not convinced that this is a tinyFISH ripoff? Well, have a look how it describes itself when connected to the betaflight configurator — smells fishy (lol) :
Alright, the F3D8 board (all racerstar design, you remember?) uses the same firmware as my tinyFISH FC? — Surprise, surprise…
The funny (?) thing is that they seem not to have a clue what they sell. Their FC is rated at 1S, whereas my design is tested on 2S and should be good on 3S as well. Maybe they swapped the voltage regulator for a cheaper chinese version that might blow up — who knows.They also promote it as “using ICM-20608-G gyroscope and gyro”. Before I received my cloned copy I was wondering how they managed to fit that to the pad layout of the MPU6000 that the board uses — surprise again, my “racerstar” f3d8 board came with a MPU6000… Let’s hope those boards support at least 2S — I am working on a 2S version of my ESC…
Be careful with their star4 ESC and their description. Some of the product images on banggood have the pinout for the lipo connection swapped… This will give you some nice smoke if you follow their instruction. Let’s hope they have at least made the boards in 2Oz copper and used good and powerful mosfets.
There are lots of comments that those are ripoffs of my work on the bangood forum, thanks for posting there! I really appreciate your support! Good to know that there are people that care about that stuff.
There are also some good news, I got mails from some shops that will start selling those boards soon with giving proper credit. Some of them seem to have bought from the same batch of PCBs with the logo removed. But they give credits on their product page. I will add them to the where to buy section soon so that you can buy those FCs from those that respect others work.
Racerstar if it happens that you read this, contact me! I already wrote you several mails to your business contact adress — with no success 🙁
Just want to thank you for the great design, even though I did end up getting one from Banggood before I saw your authorized reseller list. Just a note for anyone planning to get it from them for whatever reason, I got a spare in case I borked my DustX58’s board doing the v0.2b upgrade, but I noticed my spare board’s blue and green LED’s didn’t light up. I used a pocket microscope and noticed the blue LED was soldered on BACKWARDS (haven’t checked the green one yet). Really should have been more careful checking it before doing the upgrade, still works and flies fine though.
One of the FC leds was not configured properly, you could try this fw:
https://fishpepper.de/2017/07/19/tinyfish-fc-f3d8-buzzer-not-working-in-betaflight-3-1-7-fix/
Racerstar or Eachine, those are all brands of Banggood – they did the same with F3 FC designed by Dominic Clifton and probably countless other designs.
Don’t expect too much from chinese companies – copyrights and intellectual property doesn’t matter for them, profit is profit – this is totally different culture.
Keep up the good work, I’ll would love to buy ready made designs even for higher price, but know where the money goes.
I did exactly this by buying polish designed and manufactured F4 FC Demon Soul (highly recommended for bigger quads ;] )
Hi! Just want to add to the conversation that ReadytoFlyQuads in the US is now selling these FCs along with the 4-in-1 ESCs with the right credits. The pricing is pretty good too: http://www.readytoflyquads.com/tinyfish-f3-16x16mm-flight-controller-w-built-in-8ch-sbus-frsky-receiver.
Hi!
Any chance that some shops in Europe/Germany will be on your “where to buy” list? I got the boards from OSHpark, but I am a bit hesitant on soldering them myself (never did 0402 before and I currently don’t have a hot air station).
Cheers,
Manuel
I a quite sure they will pop up soon. There are some US stores selling them already. I am quite busy with moving to a new house right now. I will update the page with the distributor list soon.
It is great to see the groundswell of support for you in this whole fiasco Simon and the fact that you are not overly bitter, but more just plain pissed off is a real testament to your character.
Bravo fishpepper
Hey there this is Nguyen from AirBlade UAV. I’m one of the first if not the first one that sells your design on AirBladeuav.com. As a designer myself, I understand how frustrating it is to get ripped off, so I hope you find consolation knowing that I credited you for the products, I even refer to them with their original names from you.
I really like what you’re doing, as somebody who’s pushing the 2″ micro scene, I hope to see you pushing the 1.5″ space you’re doing right now.
Feel free to reach out if you wanna chat
This sucks mate. I think the big bennifet is they have seen a need for this in the market and have brought out there BR0703 motor that’s is 1.4g lighter. We need to test the thrust differance using the same props.
They have thrust tests with the BR0703 on 3.7v using 59×1.0 props. If you have a similar prop on the 1103 we could know if it is worth it and how much benifit dropping the weight by 5.6g could do to performance on 1s and 2s
56.1.0 prop on 1s you said you get 23g 1.6a and on the new design you said 26g 1.5a. With these motors being 1.4g lighter is a 15g at 1.2a a drop in thrust. They have stats for a 12000kv with 18g at 1.5a and 15000kv with 23g at 1.8a.
So is lighter better? 15g at 1.2a a 1.4g lighter should at least increase flight time.
HAve a look at the g/W rating. The 0703 seems quite inefficient to me.
I’d be interested to see how much the g/w improve if the bushings in the 0703 are replaced with real bearings
Do not expect to much, seems like they are not powerful enough.
No sense of honor or shame. It’s deplorable.