Whoop Lite Flight Controller – Quick Look

While looking through eBay, I happened upon a new silverware based flight controller that looked interesting: The Whoop Lite Flight Controller. I spent $8 of my own hard earned money to check it out to see if it was worth taking a closer look at.

First things first, it’s fairly lightweight and will come in at around the same weight as the popular E011 board. Mine with an identical weight pigtail came out to actually be about 0.1 grams lighter than the e011 flight controller. By comparison this is around a full gram lighter than the beecore v2.

The great news is the whoop lite flight controller can be soft mounted, and, it has no crystal (the silver canister that gets in the way) to get in the way like the e011 flight controller and many others using the bayang protocol have.

Unfortunately, it comes with the motor connectors not connected. VERY unfortunately is that the PCB pads are both tiny and incredibly difficult to solder to. Which is where the problems began. If you are anything less than an expert with a soldering iron, I’d steer clear of this one.

I was able to get the motor headers soldered on, after quite a lot of profanity. Once those were on, I was able to bind quickly to both a toy TX and my Devo 7E. Sadly, this flight controller has absolutely no known documentation and so I was flying blind — pun possibly intended.

Initially the quad spun uncontrollably until I realized that it must have been configured for props out rotation. In other words, all the motors are rotated around one space. This is also a configuration setting in silverware (yaw spin).

After that, everything was okay-ish, except that one motor was constantly running unusually hot and I smoked at least one motor. I can only suspect that either there was a problem with the board or a problem with my soldering to the pitiful pads on the board. In any case, it wasn’t worth the trouble to mess with it any further and I sadly had to put this flight controller to rest.

That said, the reports out on the various forums from those who have tried it, say mostly the same. It’s nearly impossible to solder to. However, it seems that it flies about as well as any of the other flight controllers you can get that are running silverware.  It doesn’t have a crystal to blow up or get in the way, it seems to have reasonably sized FETs, but it also doesn’t have any documentation whatsoever. That programming header is also going to be a JST 2.0 sized header spacing.

I would skip this one, and go for the BetaFPV Lite board which has good documentation and support. If you’re not necessarily looking for the cheapest silverware flight controller, then you’ll probably want to look at Alienwhoop’s new Zer0 board.

Better Option: