Eachine Turbine QX70 Review

Alex -

In this article I will review the eachine QX70 indoor FPV quadcopter, which is based on the popular tiny whoop FPV platform but is built as a true FPV platform. Since the announcement of the QX70 there has been much hype as its cheap and ticks all the boxes with a cleanflight/betaflight FC, decent integrated FPV camera and transmitter, and a bigger battery for longer flight times. And it still keep the shrouded motors so you can literally bounce off walls! But is it any good?

Specifications

  • Frame Size: 70mm
  • Weight with battery: 54g
  • Flight controller: Micro SP RACING F3_EVO_Brushed
  • Motors: 8520 Coreless Motor
  • Propeller Size: 40mm 4-Blade
  • Camera: 520TVL HD CMOS 1/4 inch Camera
  • Video Output format: PAL / NTSC
  • AV Wireless Transmitter: 5.8g 25mw 48ch
  • Battery: 3.7V 600mah Lipo battery
  • Flight time: 6 minutes
  • Receiver: Frsky / Flysky / DSM2/DSMX (Built into FC)

A brief bit of history

Not long ago, if you wanted a tiny micro indoor FPV quadcopter the goto platform was the tiny whoop from blade. It was a powerful and tiny toy indoor quadcopter. However you still needed to upgrade the flight controller and add your own FPV camera and equipment which meant that you got a rather terrible flight time of just a few minutes due to the added weight of the FPV gear. Eachine then made a copy of the tiny whoop called the E010, which was essentially the same thing but considerably cheaper. The E010 still had the same problem of you needing to upgrade the FC and add your FPV gear. This brings us to today where eachine have recently just released their QX70, built as a dedicated indoor FPV quadcopter!

The Good

  • Integrated RGB LED bar – that you can configure via cleanflight/betaflight
  • More powerful 8520 motors compared to E010
  • Tiny F3 flight controller compatible with cleanflight/betaflight
  • Option of Flysky, FRsky, Spectrum versions (integrated into flight controller) (Flysky receiver is not compatible with EU LBT firmware, as it only works with D8 mode)
  • Decent tiny 520TVL integrated camera and 25mW video transmitter
  • 650mAh battery – to give longer flight times, but it also adds extra weight
  • Convenient USB battery charger

The Bad

  • Rather muted flight performance due to big battery – can be remedied by using better 3 blade props or a 450-500mAh battery instead
  • Propellers can sometimes catch on motor shrouding if you push props down too hard
  • Small propellers are inefficient (but hard to break)
  • Motors can sometimes slip on a bad crash, causing the quad to become abit unstable, easy to fix as you just need to push them back down again.

Why you should get it

The QX70 is a great tiny size indoor FPV quadcopter, it ticks all the boxes in terms of specs as it includes a good FPV camera, with decent flight controller. It is great for flying indoors thanks to the prop guards which literally let you bounce off the walls. For the price it is very hard to beat. The only drawback is the slightly unresponsive flight characteristics so you not going to be doing any flips and this quadcopter will struggle outdoors if its too windy. However I have found that by using some 3 blade propellers gives some better flight times as discussed later. In addition if you use a smaller battery you get much more responsive flight at the cost of a shorter flight duration.

How does it compare to tiny whoop (Blade Inductrix FPV)

Blade also released that many people where converting their tiny whoops for FPV so they released the inductrix FPV. Overall the reception of this quad has been positive with good flight characteristics (better than QX70 in my opinion) but at the cost of very short flight times of 2 – 2:30 minutes on average. But since the QX70 is considerably cheaper and compatible with more R/C gear I feel its still a better choice. And if you need more performance you should upgrade to some 3 blade propellers

LED Light Bar

One of the coolest additional features of the QX70 is the RGB LED light bar at the back. Not only can you configure it to respond to the aircraft motion, but you can also set it to be a unique colour which is great when flying with others, or when you want to have an indoor FPV race as each quadcopter can have its own colour.

Integrated FPV camera and VTX

Compared to the QX90, the camera itself is very similar. A 520TVL fpv camera with a 40CH 25mW transmitter. However the mounting of this camera is much better. It is on a vibration isolated mount with some sticky double sided foam to make for a secure and vibration fee camera mount. The camera and video transmitter are two separate PCB boards stacked onto one another so it is very compact.

Changing channels is very easy through the use of the pushbuton on the FPV transmitter, just dont press the pushbutton on the camera which switches the camera between PAL and NTSC.

Tiny F3 flight controller

At the heart of the QX70 is an all new micro F3 brushed flight controller which has a built in receiver. There are three versions depending on what reciever you want, a flysky, frsky or spektrum compatible version. Overall this is a decent micro flight controller for brushed quadcopters compatible with both cleanflight and betaflight so you cant go wrong here. Also its definitely one of the smaller boards available on the market especially when you consider it has a built in R/C receiver.

Where to Buy

Decided to buy one?, check out our QX70 getting started guide

Suggested Upgrades

When you buy the quadcopter you should definitely consider getting a 500mAh battery to give you some more flight performance at the cost of flight time. As out of the box with the 600mAh battery it is not possible to perform flips.

Another possible addon is a small 2g 3D printed antenna protector which stops the video transmitter antenna getting bent when you land upside down! But dont add this before you upgrade the props and get a smaller battery otherwise the QX70 will act more like a hovercraft than a quadcopter. You can download the file from thingiverse

So that is it, the QX70 is a great little quadcopter for the price but requires some modifications to get crisp performance. However because of this I would still suggest you got for something abit bigger like the QX90 which has far superior flight performance. If you have any tips that made your QX70 better let us know in the comments below!