Helio RC Spring FC

Products that are Worth a Closer Look Product review As seen in the June 2018 issue of Model Aviation.

One of the newest innovations to come out of the multirotor community is the HelioRC Spring FC. On the surface, this is just another flight controller. It has an ICM 20601 gyro, full Betaflight on-screen display (OSD) support, full DSHOT and MULTISHOT support, and five full serial ports (UARTs) with built-in inverters for S.Bus and SmartPort telemetry. Those are generally standard in a premium multirotor flight controller these days, but the secret is in how the gyro is processed. The HelioRC Spring FC packs not one, but two processors. The HelioRC Spring comes equipped with an F4 processor to do all of the hard work, and another F3 processor that takes the gyro calculations and feeds them into the F4 in a simpler format to free processing power. The claim is that this board has more power than an F7 chip because of the way the two processors work together to divide the data to be processed. The layout of this board is what we’ve come to expect from a premium flight controller. All of the appropriate pads are in locations where they make sense. The camera and VTX pads are easily accessible, although unmarked, and the JST connector offers easy connections to a four-in-one ESC. Paired with the new Butterflight software, this flight controller should result in one of the smoothest-flying multirotors today. Butterflight is an open-source fork of Betaflight developed to focus solely on flight characteristics and to implement specific filters to better handle things such as propwash and gyro interference.

Butterflight supports most of the features that Betaflight users have been using in the latest builds, including OSDs, LED strip support, DShot, and blackbox flight recording. Additionally, Butterflight natively supports a 32 kHz looptime, which describes how quickly the flight controller can complete a PID loop and improve flight characteristics while in the air. As I’m writing this, the Butterflight Configurator software looks and functions much as what we are used to in Betaflight, with the exception of an altered color palette. However, the developer has stated that it plans to streamline the user interface and add wizards to make setting up new models easier and faster. For those who have been intimidated by all of the options inside of the Betaflight Configurator, this could easily become the solution that many hobbyists are looking for. HelioRC: website: www.heliorc.com